Cycle 2, Day 18
I'm well into Cycle 2 at this point and overall it's going a lot better and a lot of data has been gathered, along with some various discoveries I've made about the Inito device. It was also mentioned in a separate post, but raw data is now available at data.secondcycle.io now for your own exploration.
On the actual data side of things, I've been continually Inito testing since day 8 and have a nice hormone curve showing. I've also done two paired draws during cycle 2 and have plans to do two more this cycle to capture the mid-luteal and late luteal hormone values.
The paired draws that I've done in this cycle have also included FSH; I'm not ready to interpret what the data in this chart means yet but it does show some interesting curves.
As I mentioned in the Cycle 1 recap post, Cycle 2 is another loading phase with VagiBiom for the vaginal microbiome portion. Adherence to the VagiBiom loading schedule has been much better throughout this cycle with me currently at 9 of 12 inserted as scheduled. All three missed days came at the beginning of the cycle. I also mistakenly inserted a VagiBiom on an off day (Day 8).
My initial protocol plan was to perform the Juno Bio vaginal microbiome at about six weeks after when I sampled for the Evvy test, however that put me collecting the Juno Bio sample at the same time as luteal phases beginning; the luteal phase is triggered by the vaginal progesterone insertions starting nightly and then going to twice a day. In order to prevent possible contamination from the P4 insertions I've chosen to move the Juno Bio test to end of cycle 2/beginning of cycle 3 to ensure a clean sample collection.
Now onto some of the Inito stuff.
The Inito app doesn't have any sort of public API; the only "export" functionality is exporting a PDF which I also found rounds all results to a single decimal place. The lack of a structured export format also meant I was manually transcribing data into my cycle planner app which had occasionally led to mistakes which were difficult and tedious to catch. To get around this very "ugly" limitation I decided to spend a bit of time reverse engineering the Inito API and have now wired up a script to import data directly into my cycle planner at full fidelity (two decimal places).
I also dug further into the science behind the Inito and read the validation study [0] and found that the study included equations that predict serum concentrations from urinary metabolite readings, derived from normally cycling cis women. I used my four paired draws to compare my data versus the derived values:
| Date | Phase | E3G (Inito) | Predicted E2 | Actual E2 | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 19 | Rising | 480.84 | 547 pg/mL | 541 | 0.99 |
| Apr 2 | Declining | 73.3 | 102.5 | 65.1 | 0.64 |
| May 4 | Declining | 91.48 | 122.4 | 65.3 | 0.53 |
| May 11 | Rising | 375.34 | 432.4 | 473 | 1.09 |
I found that during rising E2 phases the equations match well to my actual E2 levels, however the math completely fell apart during the declining phases with my actual E2 being 36-47% lower than predicted. As mentioned I'm going to continue performing the paired draws to see how the math works for additional readings.
Until next time.