Dr. Nicole Cain covers three ways to test for high glutamate: urine amino acid testing, serum blood tests, and brain MRI spectroscopy. Each has limits. She recommends balancing your whole nervous system rather than chasing a single neurotransmitter number.
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Hi, this is Dr. Nicole Cain and this is video number three in the series All About Glutamate. In this video, we're going to be talking about glutamate testing and root cause testing. So let's say that you watched one of the videos and you identified that you may have symptoms associated with high glutamate and you're wondering what to do next. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of reliable tests for glutamate specifically, but here are a few ideas to get you started. Urine amino acid testing. This urine test can give you an overall average of the amount of glutamate and GABA being eliminated in your urine. Unfortunately, this doesn't give you much information on what's actually happening with the glutamate in your brain. There are also glutamate blood tests. So you can do a blood test to look at the amount of glutamate in your blood, but the problem with that is that serum levels can rise and drop pretty rapidly, so it doesn't give you much more than an in the moment assessment of glutamate. The third assessment of glutamate is an mri, which can look at where glutamate is being metabolized and pooling in the brain. The con for this, though, is that MRI testing can be really expensive and isn't often covered by insurance. Instead of just looking at isolated neurotransmitters, I want you to think about brain and nervous system balancing as a whole, which you're going to learn all about in these videos to come. So thank you for being here.
