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How much variation do you see in cortisol on the DUTCH test when, for example, you didn’t sleep well one night, assuming normally you sleep well or had some other form of acute stress?

Chris Kresser: We would expect to see variation. Cortisol is a hormone that responds in a matter of minutes to changes in the stress response. It doesn’t respond as quickly as epinephrine and norepinephrine because, as I explained, the physiology there is different. Those are part of the immediate fight-or-flight response, and they’re neurologically mediated, and they need to be released very quickly because they help with survival. Cortisol release tends to happen a little more slowly than that but still can change. We know that after exercise, for example, cortisol levels are elevated, which is why it’s not recommended to exercise right before doing a saliva test, for example. And certainly if you have an acute stressful event and you sleep really poorly, that could affect the levels on the DUTCH test, and I think it even mentions that in the instructions, that you don’t want to do the DUTCH test on a weekend, for example, because if you’re trying to get a sense of your stress levels in your day-to-day life and you work during the week, then doing it during the week is better than doing it over the weekend for that reason. It is fairly responsive.

 

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