Impact of a social skills program on children's stress: A cluster randomized trial
Larose et al.
The finding, in our words
A social skills intervention programme delivered in child care centres produced a significant interaction with time of day for diurnal cortisol secretion in preschool children (p = 0.04), with the intervention group showing more typical decreasing cortisol patterns throughout the day. This demonstrates that saliva-based cortisol monitoring in decentralised settings can detect clinically meaningful changes in stress physiology among paediatric populations.
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.
The online Trier Social Stress Test produced cortisol responses in 63% of adolescents with an effect size of 0.57 from baseline to peak, matching in-person test results. This remote protocol allows HPA axis assessment without laboratory visits, making it viable for decentralised research and populations distant from research centres.
In a study of 46 perinatal nicotine users, dried blood spots and saliva were used weekly to measure reproductive hormones, finding that lower postpartum estradiol and greater peripartum declines in oxytocin were associated with increased nicotine craving and use. This demonstrates the feasibility of decentralised microsampling and remote surveys for longitudinal hormone tracking in vulnerable populations.
Long-term sleep quality improved significantly during an internet-based intervention for major depressive disorder. Patients with poor sleep initially showed blunted cortisol awakening responses, which normalised as sleep quality improved, demonstrating that self-collected saliva can track biological stress changes in decentralised mental health care.
Higher lifetime trauma exposure in adolescent mothers was associated with higher evening salivary cortisol, and maternal trauma during pregnancy was associated with higher bedtime cortisol in infants, suggesting that self-collected saliva can capture diurnal cortisol patterns relevant to trauma research and decentralised sampling.