From your morning coffee to late-night scrolling on your phone, many of the things we do every day have one thing in common: dopamine.

Organic Acid Testing (OAT) is a powerful functional lab tool used in integrative and nutritional medicine to assess metabolic pathways, nutrient status, gut health, and especially the balance of neurotransmitters in the body. While it doesn’t measure neurotransmitters directly in the brain, it provides key information about how your body is producing, breaking down, and clearing neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and GABA.

Dopamine is a critical neurotransmitter that influences motivation, mood, focus, reward-seeking behavior, and movement control. The synthesis of dopamine in the brain is a tightly regulated, multi-step process that depends not only on amino acid availability but also on a range of cofactors and genetic enzymes.

Neuroinflammation refers to the activation of the brain’s immune cells—primarily microglia and astrocytes—in response to injury, infection, or toxins.

Noradrenaline (also known as norepinephrine) is a vital neurotransmitter and hormone that plays a central role in regulating your alertness, stress response, attention, energy metabolism, and cardiovascular function. It is part of the body’s "fight-or-flight" system and is closely related to both dopamine and adrenaline.

The Mu Opioid Receptor (MOR) is a crucial part of the brain’s pain, reward, and emotional regulation systems. It’s coded by the OPRM1 gene, which determines how your brain responds to both endogenous opioids (those produced naturally in the body) and exogenous opioids (such as medications and drugs).

Dopamine is a powerful neurotransmitter involved in motivation, pleasure, attention, reward, movement, and impulse control. Its effects in the brain are not just determined by how much dopamine is produced, but also by how it's transported, recycled, and received by receptors.

Dopamine Beta-Hydroxylase (DBH) is a key enzyme in the dopamine metabolism pathway, responsible for converting dopamine (DA) into norepinephrine (NA)—also known as noradrenaline. This enzyme plays a critical role in maintaining the balance between two of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters: dopamine and norepinephrine.

The COMT gene (Catechol-O-Methyltransferase) is a key player in your brain’s dopamine regulation system. It helps break down dopamine, especially in the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain responsible for decision-making, focus, impulse control, and emotional regulation.

Dopamine is a key neurotransmitter that plays a central role in motivation, reward, focus, movement, learning, and emotional regulation. Balanced dopamine levels are essential for optimal brain and nervous system function.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder that primarily affects movement, but can also impact mood, sleep, digestion, and cognition. It is caused by the gradual loss of dopamine-producing neurons in a brain region called the substantia nigra.

The neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine are essential for mood, motivation, sleep, focus, and stress resilience. To produce these brain chemicals, the body needs not only amino acid building blocks but also a functioning BH4 cycle (tetrahydrobiopterin cycle).