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  4. 25-year-old female with anxiety and depression, which is a very cyclical pattern tied to her menstrual cycle. Can you suggest some lab tests to order in treatment to consider? She’s already on Vitex or chaste tree berry, eats Paleo, exercises, and sleeps well.
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  4. 25-year-old female with anxiety and depression, which is a very cyclical pattern tied to her menstrual cycle. Can you suggest some lab tests to order in treatment to consider? She’s already on Vitex or chaste tree berry, eats Paleo, exercises, and sleeps well.
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  4. 25-year-old female with anxiety and depression, which is a very cyclical pattern tied to her menstrual cycle. Can you suggest some lab tests to order in treatment to consider? She’s already on Vitex or chaste tree berry, eats Paleo, exercises, and sleeps well.

25-year-old female with anxiety and depression, which is a very cyclical pattern tied to her menstrual cycle. Can you suggest some lab tests to order in treatment to consider? She’s already on Vitex or chaste tree berry, eats Paleo, exercises, and sleeps well.

Dr. Amy Nett:  Of course, if they’re cyclical, you’d probably want to look at hormone levels, and since you have her on Vitex, it sounds like you’ve probably already tested the progesterone and estrogen levels since we use Vitex to help raise progesterone levels. I would still apparently check in on the hormone levels just to see what they’re looking like. Some people think about anxiety and depression as being related to inflammation. We think about anxiety and depression as potentially being due to inflammation and just happening to manifest as inflammation in the brain effectively. Then, you’re still going to want to do the full workup, which is going to be gut testing. I mean, almost all of our patients who come in through CCFM, we’re going to start with the core, which is gut testing right. We want to do a SIBO breath test. We’re probably going to do stool testing through Doctor’s Data or maybe some BioHealth stool test, perhaps a urine organic acids test. Even though this seems to be related to hormones because she’s having a cyclical pattern of the anxiety and depression, there’s still going to be a question in my mind as to what’s causing the hormonal imbalance in the first place, especially this is a 25-year-old female. If there is a hormonal shift that’s sort of precipitating or worsening some of these mood issues, what is it? What’s causing that hormonal imbalance? If I didn’t see a hormonal imbalance in her hormone testing, I would be thinking about what are her endocrine disruptors. I might be thinking about a heavy metal toxicity, so I might run a Quiksilver blood metals panel or a Doctor’s Data toxic elements profile, and then of course we always get a comprehensive blood panel on everyone—so, comprehensive blood panel, gut testing with the SIBO breath test, stool test, urine inorganic acids test. Those are all things that I would certainly think about, so just as with every other patient, go to the foundation. What’s the core? What are the foundational pieces in terms of gut inflammation, blood panel? And then again probably a hormone profile. Currently, we’re using the DUTCH complete hormone profile. You can look at both sex hormones, which we don’t cover in this particular course, but also looking at the HPA axis. So cortisol, what does her cortisol rhythm look like? Is there HPA axis disruption? So those are few places to start.

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