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. 2024 May 9:38:100789.
doi: 10.1016/j.bbih.2024.100789. eCollection 2024 Jul.

Seven robust and easy to obtain biomarkers to measure acute stress

Koen Hogenelst  1 , Serdar Özsezen  2 , Robert Kleemann  3 , Lars Verschuren  2 , Ivo Stuldreher  1 , Charelle Bottenheft  1 , Jan van Erp  4   5 , Anne-Marie Brouwer  1   6
Affiliations

Seven robust and easy to obtain biomarkers to measure acute stress

Koen Hogenelst et al. Brain Behav Immun Health. .

Abstract

With the purpose of identifying a sensitive, robust, and easy-to-measure set of biomarkers to assess stress reactivity, we here study a large set of relatively easy to obtain markers reflecting subjective, autonomic nervous system (ANS), endocrine, and inflammatory responses to acute social stress (n = 101). A subset of the participants was exposed to another social stressor the next day (n = 48) while being measured in the same way. Acute social stress was induced following standardized procedures. The markers investigated were self-reported positive and negative affect, heart rate, electrodermal activity, salivary cortisol, and ten inflammatory markers both in capillary plasma and salivary samples, including IL-22 which has not been studied in response to acute stress in humans before. Robust effects (significant effect in the same direction for both days) were found for self-reported negative affect, heart rate, electrodermal activity, plasma IL-5, plasma IL-22, salivary IL-8 and salivary IL-10. Of these seven markers, the participants' IL-22 responses on the first day were positively correlated to those on the second day. We found no correlations between salivary and capillary plasma stress responses for any of the ten cytokines and somewhat unexpectedly, cytokine responses in saliva seemed more pronounced and more in line with previous literature than cytokines in capillary plasma. In sum, seven robust and easy to obtain biomarkers to measure acute stress response were identified and should be used in future stress research to detect and examine stress reactivity. This includes IL-22 in plasma as a promising novel marker.

Keywords: Acute stress response; Cortisol; Cytokines; Immune; Multimodal; Psychophysiology.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Pre- and post-stressor values (coded in respectively blue and orange) of affect and ANS variables, and cortisol AUC in response to the acute stress test, for day 1 (left) and day 2 (right). Significant (within-participant) differences between pre- and post-stressor values (see Table 1) are indicated by stars. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Pre- and post-stressor values (coded in respectively blue and orange) for each of the ten cytokines in plasma and saliva on day 1 and day 2. Significant (within-participant) differences between pre- and post-stressor values (see Table 2) are indicated by stars. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
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