2025 · Journal of participatory medicine · open access
A Community-Engaged Approach for Assessment of Cortisol Dynamic Range and Multilevel Chronic Stress in African Americans: FAITH! Heart Health+ Ancillary Study
Ortiz et al.
The finding, in our words
Cortisol dynamic range measured from participant-led saliva collection was feasible and associated with higher perceived stress and anxiety in African American women, suggesting saliva self-collection can serve as a decentralised biomarker of chronic stress.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
This study used home self-collected saliva samples to successfully monitor cytokines and cortisol in mothers and infants, finding that a community singing intervention significantly reduced salivary interleukin-6 levels in mothers with postnatal depression.
In women with endometriosis, longer individual exercise sessions were associated with lower levels of salivary c-reactive protein and estradiol, as well as reduced pain and fat mass. The results demonstrate the utility of timed, at-home saliva self-collection for assessing systemic biomarkers in reproductive health research.
In 60 healthy young adults who self-collected saliva, habitual coffee consumption at low, moderate or high intake did not significantly alter morning or evening levels of salivary cortisol or alpha amylase under non-stressful conditions. This suggests that for decentralised diagnostics, coffee drinking is unlikely to confound salivary hormone results, supporting the validity of self-collection for cortisol and stress biomarker monitoring.
In sixteen workers observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, those working from home had higher waking and lower nocturnal melatonin, and higher oxytocin, than office-based colleagues, while cortisol and s-IgA rhythms were unchanged. The study shows that self-collected saliva samples can detect how remote work alters stress-related biomarkers, supporting decentralised occupational-health monitoring.
Repeated self-collection of saliva for steroid hormone analysis proved feasible in dementia care dyads over eight weeks, with participants providing a mean of 4.3 to 4.9 morning samples weekly during the first seven weeks, falling to 3.3 in the final week. The music intervention was associated with lower morning cortisol concentrations in caregivers, showing that home-based saliva microsampling can objectively capture intervention effects in decentralised studies.