Community singing intervention reduces maternal salivary cytokines and enhances maternal-infant cortisol synchrony in postnatal depression: biological findings from the SHAPER-PND trial
Kirkpatrick et al.
The finding, in our words
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.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
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.
Emami et al., Upsala journal of medical sciences · source ↗
Daily home-based saliva collection proved feasible for six to eight weeks in people with dementia and their caregivers, with a quarter showing decreases in both morning and evening cortisol, suggesting stress reduction. Caregivers displayed a significant flattening of the morning to evening cortisol slope and dyads showed correlated evening cortisol trends, demonstrating that self-sampling can objectively monitor stress in decentralised studies of vulnerable populations.
This review summarises the use of saliva as a non-invasive diagnostic fluid for systemic diseases, toxicology, therapeutic drug monitoring and neuropsychiatric disorders. It concludes that the ease of self-collection makes saliva particularly suitable for psychiatric patients who may struggle to cooperate with venous sampling.
Self-collected saliva from pregnant women showed that high prenatal cortisol and salivary alpha-amylase were associated with increased negative emotionality in female infants but decreased negative emotionality in male infants at two months. This demonstrates that home-based saliva collection can capture biomarkers relevant to infant developmental outcomes, supporting decentralised research into early-life programming.
Braithwaite et al., Psychoneuroendocrinology · source ↗
The study determined that an at-home saliva collection protocol using the passive drool method was feasible for Black women with histories of abuse, with 84% of participants completing at least one full day of adherent sampling. While the decentralised approach yielded usable cortisol data, women with histories of forced sex exposure showed lower protocol adherence scores.
Tsuyuki et al., Interactive journal of medical research (paywalled) · source ↗