2023 · International journal of yoga therapy · paywalled
Self-Administered Gentle Yoga and Yoga Breathing Intervention Improves Burden and Stress Biomarkers in Caregivers of Persons Living with Dementia
Balasubramanian et al.
The finding, in our words
Twenty dementia caregivers self-collected saliva at home while using a mobile yoga app for twelve weeks. Those who practised most showed decreased salivary cortisol and increased 1,5-anhydroglucitol, indicating that self-collected saliva can track stress responses to decentralised behavioural interventions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.