2021 · The American journal of occupational therapy : official publication of the American Occupational Therapy Association · paywalled
Relationship Between Parental Attachment and Stress Elevation and Synchrony in Pediatric Occupational Therapy Patient-Parent Dyads
Scott et al.
The finding, in our words
A pilot study in 10 child-parent dyads showed that collecting saliva at clinic and home is feasible, with parent attachment avoidance linked to higher parent cortisol in clinic and higher child cortisol at home, and parent-child cortisol levels correlated in clinic but not at home.
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.
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.
Among children of parents with bipolar disorder, saliva samples collected at home over two days showed that improvements in family organisation during a six-month prevention programme were associated with adaptive changes in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity, including elevated cortisol awakening response and steeper diurnal slope. These results indicate that decentralised saliva collection can capture clinically meaningful neuroendocrine responses to psychosocial interventions in at-risk paediatric populations.
A validated LC-MS/MS assay successfully measured 13 steroid hormones and two synthetic steroids in saliva, requiring only 50 microlitres, or down to 2 to 5 microlitres for nine analytes. This shows saliva's viability for non-invasive, patient-centric microsampling and decentralised monitoring in paediatric, neonatal and adult populations.
In a 14-day study of youth with neurodevelopmental conditions and chronic pain, multimodal in-home monitoring achieved good accelerometer wear compliance (77% wore devices for at least 7 days) and moderate survey engagement, but adherence to salivary cortisol sampling was low at 28% after excluding protocol violations and dry swabs. Families reported high overall satisfaction and willingness to participate again, highlighting that remote sampling protocols in pediatric populations require iterative tailoring to improve biospecimen collection adherence.