ASI Brochure | Dr. James Farley

Hi, this is Dr. James Farley. I am going to be going through with you today the adrenal salivary index testing. So mainly what you're looking at is you're taking measurements over a time frame, four times throughout the day, to look at what your cortisol levels are doing. If we don't know the time of day of the cortisol testing, the test is irrelevant. The most accurate way to look at the hormones is in asaliva sample because those are the free hormones. And again, we take it over four times throughout the day. And then there's a regular graph that we look at and we compare you to the regular graph. So, your regular graph should be that your cortisol is highest early, and then gradually comes down over time and we see a change over the 24-hour period. We then just look at how your graph compares to that graph to get an idea of what's happening with your salivary cortisol levels.

It also looks at your DHEA, because cortisol and your sex hormones, they compete.The master hormone is cholesterol, and then from there it goes to pregnenolone and then pregnenolone can go over here to your stress hormones or down here to your sex hormones. If there's an imbalance there over time, then we can see a change in the ratio of the DHEA-cortisol ratio. And when we look at this, we're looking at again the four time frames from 7 AM-9 AM, 11 AM-1 PM, 3 PM-5 PM, and 10 PM-12 AM.We take samples and then we want to see that you dropped within a normal range. Once we determine that you're either within a normal range, that's great, nothing to do there, or that you're outside that range, we then can look at what to do with this to start to make some change.

Keep in mind there's three types of stressors that can throw this off. There's mental/emotional stress, there's physical stress, and a big physical stress for a lot of people is that they're not moving enough, there's no exercise in their life, and then the third is chemical stress. The chemical stress could come in a form of food, nutrient deficiencies, dysbiosis, pathogens inside the body, improper methylation, blood sugar issues, or thyroid issues. All types of issues can create chemical imbalances and then can show up as a high stress response.

We also can track this over time, so as we start to implement things, this should get better and better and better over time. The other thing that you want to know too is that your stress response, your cortisol and your melatonin, are inversely related. That means that your stress response and your blood sugar is connected to your sleep. Many times, sleep is an abnormal circadian brain rhythm happening. And that messes with your ASI, your adrenal salivary index, which over time can change your melatonin production and cause you sleep issues.