Organic Acids Test (OAT)

This Organic Acids Test looks at more than 130 chemical by-products in your urine. Each one comes from a different part of how your body makes energy, handles nutrients, processes brain chemicals, manages inflammation, and interacts with the microbes in your gut and the chemicals in your environment. By looking at the overall pattern, we get a detailed snapshot of how these systems are running.

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 also calculates key ratios between these markers, which can reveal whether inflammation is diverting resources away from brain chemical production.

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. It also includes a direct inflammation marker and an antioxidant status marker, giving a broader picture of your body’s inflammatory and protective balance.

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.

This area screens for chemical traces that your body leaves behind after processing common environmental substances - solvents found in paints, fuels, and adhesives; plasticisers in food packaging and plastic products; preservatives in cosmetics and personal care products; and compounds from vehicle exhaust and cigarette smoke. A raised reading doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being harmed - it’s a prompt to think about where the exposure might be coming from and whether it can be reduced.