How is Stress Affecting Your Body Clock?
 Most people on antidepressants and/or sleeping pills have a correctable, stress-induced, altered body clock.
 4-point Salivary Cortisol testing can assess chronic stress.Â
 Daily fatigue and brain fog is NOT part of normal aging. Â
Salivary Cortisol Curves Determine Chronic Stress
With over 10,000 Salivary Cortisol tests interpreted, Dr. Zengo can identify and fix your stress-induced body clock alterations.
Forget 5-Hour Energy... How About 5-Year Energy?
Fatigue, Fog, and Sleeplessness can be better treated with Bio-Identical Medicine than with caffeine and drugs.
Deeper Sleep and More Alertness Without Drugs
We help you fix the stressors that prevent your body clock from properly waking you up, and winding you down fully.
Adrenal Stress Video Library
Produced by New Image
Medical Director Gregory Zengo, MD
Georgia’s Adrenal Fatigue Treatment Headquarters
Stress and it’s effect on our body’s delicate balance is the leading cause of symptoms like
Poor Sleep
Fatigue
Mental Fog
Irritability
Low Sex Drive
… and many of the symptoms we attribute to “normal” aging even when we are young
But stress sells pharmaceuticals and mainstream medicine is quick to label you as Depressed, Anxiety Disorder, Insomnia, Chronic Fatigue, Adult ADD, Fibromyalgia and offer you multiple drugs. These drugs are expensive, create many side effects, and often do not fix the problem completely. Symptom descriptor “diseases” like Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, and Adult ADD all have many criteria that overlap with the findings in adrenal fatigue. In fact, in our experience, adrenal fatigue correlates more with low sex drive than imbalances of testosterone.
The medical literature has over 5,000 literature citations on salivary cortisol testing. The test is one of the most reliable indicators of how the perception of chronic stress can alter the way you sleep and the energy you have when you wake up each day. The primitive midbrain cannot reason, and often overcompensates for stressors in your daily life. A few late days at work earning overtime might be a good idea, but what if your brain interprets it as a bear or a lion stalking you every day? Your brain will adapt by trying to keep you safe inside the cave in the future. This can lead to sluggishness and fog when you try to leave the cave and go back to work again.
Your New Image Stress Assessment starts first with enumerating your identifiable and your subconscious stressors. Then we order customized testing and let your body show us what is wrong. We never tell you to just quit your job or exercise more to control your stress. We pursue targeted therapies to force your body to react differently to your stressors. After all, if you are not attacked by a bear every day, then you don’t need your brain to act like you are just because you stay late at work or rush around taking 3 kids to after-school activities. We incorporate other stress-induced imbalances of sex steroids, thyroid and neurotransmitters to complete your assessment. Then we give back what is missing. We have been helping patients this way for over 12 years.
We will always strive to find out WHY you are tired, sluggish, foggy and irritable. In our experience, true diseases that require pharmaceuticals to treat are very rare when these symptoms present. We always need to look at stress-induced changes to your core physiologic pathways, and fix those FIRST before even considering any diagnosis like depression or insomnia.
Frequently Asked Questions about Adrenal Stress, Body Clock, and Adrenal Fatigue testing and treatment
I have done BHRT for years and nobody has offered me a 4-Point Salivary Cortisol Test
Yes. Sadly this is quite common.
The Adrenal stress assessment addresses more symptoms than any other bio-identical test/treatment combination. However, gonadal steroid testing and treatment generates the most income for practices who administer pellets and for compounding pharmacies. Also, it is well known that sex steroids change at a given age and this makes it an easy condition to understand and treat. However, an altered adrenal stress curve often begins in our late teenage years and degrades consistently over time, making it the ideal system to test in patients of any age. And altered body clock is responsible for many more symptoms than even the best sex steroid replacement regimen.
Any provider who has a comprehensive knowledge of every system that can succumb to stress knows the significance of the 4-point salivary cortisol test as a core initial assessment.
I was told to take DHEA for presumed adrenal fatigue?
We also test DHEA levels and recommend only replacing it when DHEA is low. Taking DHEA in order to make something else is like gambling with your body.
DHEA is an important marker when there is also adrenal stress or adrenal fatigue. However, because DHEA is cheap and over the counter, it is often abused, overdosed and taken without proper levels done first. Never take DHEA without checking salivary levels first as it DHEA can convert to other hormones that we cannot measure and you might not need.
My Chiropractor suggested I take Pregnenolone. Do you test for that?
Pregnenolone is at the very top of the steroid cascade and there is no reliable test for it. It is considered an intermediary with little receptor activity. Therefore, it is hard to know when one is deficient and how to track the replacement. Also, giving pregnenolone means that it can convert into at least two dozen other active hormones and metabolites that we cannot control. Pregnenolone is often given by providers who lack the licensure and training to write prescriptions since it is over the counter, while bio-identical cortisol and the sex steroids hormones that truly replace what is missing, require a prescription.
Therefore, we prefer to replace the downstream, active hormones that we can measure, track and trace. We don’t consider pregnenolone to be a bio-identical treatment.