How to Read Your Hormone Panel

Most androgen tests measure a finished hormone. This one measures a half-built part still on the bench, and that is exactly what makes it worth drawing.

Total testosterone counts every molecule of the hormone in your blood, but most of it is locked away and unavailable. That gap is why a normal result and real symptoms can sit on the same report.

It sounds like a calcium test. On almost every report, it isn't one. Here is what calcitonin is really measuring.

A hormone you often notice by its absence. Inhibin B tells the pituitary to ease off FSH, so the moment it fades, FSH gets louder.

The supplement aisle calls it the mother hormone and promises sharper memory and slower aging. The single human trial that tested those claims found nothing.

The salt-and-water hormone that can quietly run high behind blood pressure no medication seems to fix.

Growth hormone pulses through the day in bursts no single blood draw can catch. IGF-1 is the steady downstream level clinicians read instead, and reading it wrong cuts both ways.

Growth hormone is the rare result confirmed by deliberately pushing it down or driving it up, not by reading it where it sits.

Renin is the question; aldosterone is the answer. Read together, the pair screens for one of the most common fixable causes of high blood pressure.

17-OHP barely does anything on its own. Its whole value is where it sits: one step before the enzyme that's missing in most congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

Cortisol swings with the clock and with stress. DHEA-sulfate barely moves, which is exactly why your doctor draws it. Here is what the number actually says.

SHBG decides how much of your testosterone and estrogen is actually free to work, without changing the total at all. It's measured to make sense of a hormone number, not for its own sake.

Free testosterone is the sliver of the hormone your tissues can actually reach. When total testosterone looks fine but you don't, this is usually the number worth checking, and how it was measured changes whether you can trust it.

Estradiol runs on the menstrual calendar, climbing roughly tenfold from the start of a cycle to the day before ovulation. Read without the day it was drawn, the number on your report can look alarming and mean almost nothing.

The pituitary fires LH in pulses, so one blood draw catches the signal mid-sweep. Read beside FSH, though, LH does something few single numbers can: it tells you whether a hormone problem starts at the gland or the brain above it.

Progesterone is the one sex-hormone test that mostly answers a yes-or-no question: did you ovulate? Drawn on the wrong day, a low number proves nothing, which is why the famous day-21 rule misfires for so many people.

Cortisol runs on a daily timetable, peaking around the moment you wake and thinning out by midnight. Read without the clock beside it, the number on your report can look alarming and mean almost nothing.

Most hormones report what your body is doing. Prolactin can report what the needle did: the stress of the draw, a dopamine-blocking pill, or an inert decoy molecule can all push it up while you feel completely fine.

FSH is the pituitary's bid for the next egg, and the bid climbs as the ovaries' supply runs down. Read on the wrong cycle day, or without its partner hormones, a single number says far less than it looks like it does.

AMH counts how many small follicles your ovaries still hold. It is sold as an egg-timer, but it does not predict whether you'll conceive naturally, and the same high number means two opposite things.

ACTH is the pituitary's order to the adrenal glands to make cortisol. On its own the number means little. Paired with a cortisol that has already come back wrong, it points to where the fault sits.