Archival ReportHair Cortisol as a Biomarker of Traumatization in Healthy Individuals and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Patients
Section snippets
Participants
Posttraumatic stress disorder patients were recruited from the outpatient unit of the Technische Universität Dresden Institute of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy before the start of cognitive-behavioral therapy treatment. In addition, participants were recruited via local advertisements and flyers. Overall, 227 participants were screened for admission to the study. Overall exclusion criteria for all three groups were hair shorter than 3 cm at the posterior vertex region of the scalp,
Results
Groups were well-matched on sociodemographic and hair-related variables (ps>.052; Table 1). Oral contraceptive use, menopausal status, medication intake, or physical illness were unrelated to HCC (ps>.311). As expected, PTSD patients scored significantly higher on measures of PTSD symptoms (PDS sum score, Impact of Event Scale-Revised subscales) than TC participants (p<.001). Similarly, the three groups also differed on measures of frequency and number of traumatization (THQ), depressive
Discussion
This study set out to investigate associations between PTSD, trauma-related characteristics, and patterns of long-term cortisol secretion. Our findings reveal considerably lower HCC in PTSD patients and traumatized healthy control subjects compared with nontraumatized individuals, indicating that trauma exposure constitutes a crucial correlate of basal cortisol secretion even in the absence of PTSD diagnosis. Furthermore, we found reduced HCC to be related to a larger number and frequency of
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2022, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCitation Excerpt :Wingenfeld et al. (2015) analyzed urinary cortisol levels in a large cohort recruited at two Veterans Affairs medical centers (N = 613) and found cortisol levels were lower in PTSD patients. A fourth study evaluating hair and salivary cortisol also found lower hair cortisol levels among those with PTSD in comparison to non-trauma exposed controls, but no association with salivary measures (Steudte et al., 2013). Six studies examined levels of seven phenols available in HMDB.