Re: Salivary cortisol - how many?

[Guest guest]

I am wondering about ordering 2 cortisol tests – one for now and one for a follow-up? I’m assuming one does a follow up at some point? And if so, how is that done, since one would be supplementing HC during a follow-up test?

Why I am asking is that this test is for my adult daughter. She had a traumatic brain injury as a child, which damaged her pituitary, resulting all her needing all kinds of hormonal supplementation. The difficulty is that she is not a good self-reporter. She has significant learning disabilities due to the injury and is not good at describing how she feels, or even noticing until it’s really very late. For this reason, we do rely heavily on bloodwork to know if we are within range (ex: Free t3 needs to be within a very specific range but she is not able to notice the difference, so we regularly do bloodwork).

My question, then, is do I order 2 salivary cortisol tests, doing one now, getting the results, starting HC, and running a followup test in X amount of weeks?