Weak and uneven associations of home, neighborhood, and school environments with stress hormone output across multiple timescales
Malanchini et al.
The finding, in our words
Children aged 8 to 14 living in neighbourhoods with higher concentrated poverty showed higher diurnal cortisol output when measured in saliva samples. Otherwise, cortisol output showed little association with other aspects of social disadvantage, suggesting limited support for HPA axis dysregulation as a general mechanism linking socioeconomic inequality to health outcomes in childhood.
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.
Maternal choline intake was found to reduce the impact of adverse childhood experiences on maternal and infant cortisol responses, highlighting the role of nutrition in buffering stress biology. This supports decentralised diagnostics by demonstrating the feasibility and value of self-collected saliva samples for longitudinal, patient-centric monitoring of hormonal biomarkers in real-world settings.
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.
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.
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.