Relationships Among Number of Stressors, Perceived Stress, and Salivary Cortisol Levels During the Third Trimester of Pregnancy.
Rebecca Salomon, Sandra Weiss
PMID 38048897WHAT IT FOUND
Pregnant women who felt more stressed had lower overall amount of cortisol across the day.
The number of recent stressors tracked with feeling stressed but did not show a clear cortisol link once other factors were considered.
Key findings
01In the adjusted model, higher perceived stress was associated with lower overall cortisol secretion across the day (p = .01).
02The number of stressors was associated with diurnal slope in the simple analysis (r = -0.32, p = .015), but this association was not significant after adjustment.
03The number of stressors was associated with perceived stress after adjustment (p = .002).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Because the analysis used data from one timepoint, it cannot show that stress causes a cortisol change or that cortisol changes affect stress perception. The sample was limited to the third trimester, so it does not speak to stress and cortisol across the whole pregnancy. The analysis included 73 women, which may be too small to detect some associations. The stressor measure counted events over 6 months but did not capture severity or how long each stressor lasted. The average number of stressors was low, so the study could not clearly separate people with a very high stressor burden from others. Three extreme cortisol values were replaced with the participant's value from the other sampling day. There was little recent literature available to compare with these findings.
Declared interests
The supplied text reports NIH grant R01HD081188 for the parent study and states that the authors used OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 language models to refine language and framing.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that reducing stressors will change cortisol. The study is cross-sectional, did not test an intervention, and the number of stressors was not associated with cortisol after adjustment. It also cannot show that perceived stress caused the cortisol pattern.