Organic Acids Test (OAT)

This Organic Acids Test looks at about 60 chemical by-products in your urine. Each one comes from a different part of how your body makes energy, handles nutrients, processes neurotransmitters, and interacts with the microbes in your gut. By looking at the overall pattern, we get a snapshot of how some of these systems are running. A few things to know before reading the results:

This area looks at chemicals produced by the trillions of microbes living in your gut, giving a rough read on which microbial groups are more or less active than usual. It won't tell you exactly which species are present, but it can flag patterns worth a closer look with your clinician.

Your cells turn food into energy through a series of chemical steps inside the mitochondria, and this area measures the by-products of those steps to see how smoothly the process is running. Isolated findings here are common and often shift with diet or recent activity — the pattern across markers matters more than any single result.

After your body uses brain chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline, it breaks them down into smaller by-products that pass out in urine, which this area measures as an indirect read on messenger activity. These markers are influenced by diet, sleep, stress, caffeine and medications, so a single reading is rarely diagnostic on its own.

This area looks at how well your body is handling everyday cellular wear-and-tear and clearing the substances your liver needs to process — medications, hormones, alcohol, and the by-products of your own metabolism. Temporary elevations are common after intense exercise, illness, or high alcohol intake, and are usually not concerning in isolation.

This area combines two different views of your nutrient status: "functional" markers that rise when your body is working harder to use a vitamin, and direct measurements of vitamins passing through in urine. Together they give a rough indication of which nutrients may be in higher demand, though a blood test is still the gold standard for confirming any specific deficiency.

These markers look for traces of industrial solvents — particularly xylene, found in paints, glues, printing inks, and cigarette smoke — that leave distinctive chemical fingerprints when your body processes them. A raised reading here usually points first to smoking status, then to work, hobbies, or recent contact with solvent-containing products.