I’ve completed most the seminars by ​Apex​. He is discussing how he is using DUTCH test with one of the instructors who practices Functional Medicine. ​​And research from 2015 study of biomarkers in medicine that showed the metabolites of estrogen only have an hour jar value 0.25 as it relates to serum and saliva. He said bottom line is that aside from challenge or urinary metabolites of hormone being postrenal or posthepatic, there is only a weak correlation of serum and salivary estrogens.

Chris Kresser: I wouldn’t totally disagree with that. There are other papers that show a tighter correlation. That’s just one paper, but we mostly use that test for cortisol, cortisol awakening response, and the steroid hormones and because doing the full panel that includes the other markers is not very much more than just doing the adrenal panel, and it gives you additional markers that we want, we use it as a starting place for sex hormone stuff. But if there is any kind of abnormality on the sex hormones, or even if there isn’t and we suspect that there may be, we always go forward and do serum testing for sex hormones for some other reasons that he mentioned, that postrenal and posthepatic metabolites that you’re measuring don’t always correlate exactly well with serum.