Hi everyone,

I’m back. I started a new thread coz the old one got too long !!!

Here’s the article I was referring to.

http://www.netsci.org/Science/Bioinform/feature02.html

Most of it is too technical for me and went waaaaaaay over my head.  I read the introduction bit and that was confused me a lot. I think the authors say that cortisol starts climbing at midnight and achieves a peak at morning. Which means starting midnight the levels start increasing. How do you acheive increasing levels with a pill which is designed to flush itself out gradually. The pill is doing the opposite of what the body does. Is my understanding right ?

I also note a statement that says, the hypothalamus and pituitary are most sensitive to negative feedback at midnight, is that the technical way of saying that if at midnight the cortisol levels are low then the hypothalamus and pituitary will take note immediately and start acting, meaning start secreting more ACTH. In normal human beings since according to an earlier statement the cortisol starts to climb steadily at midnight, could be a reaction to the ACTH.

I could be way off the mark here. I have trouble understanding too much technical stuff but I’m really keen to get this right. So please all of you who have this down to a science, let me know if this is what the article implies.

 

In the meantime, real weird things are happening with my daughter’s levels. In Feb her levels were 454, her endo increased her dose to 2/2/3. Then she went to 18 in April. So we went back to 2/2/2. We went to NY and the blood work there came back 134, we then went to 2/1/2. Now the latest numbers are 10 !!! All of this for 17-ohp. I’m really stumped. How can her levels go down when the meds have been reduced. It looks like the more we reduce her medication the more "theoretically oversuppressed" she is getting, although our endo does not think so. He goes by the ranges for her age that say, anything under 90 is normal. She was overweight until about a month ago and then now she dropped. Is in the 20th percentile for both height and weight. She was 19 inchs at birth and in 9 months has grown 8 inches.

I just don’t know what to make of this. Any comments !!

Thanks,

SueG