“This project highlights the power of salivary bioscience research to bring together experts from diverse fields. Collaborating with my co-authors, who are specialists in Pediatrics, Public Health, and Psychological Science, provided invaluable interdisciplinary insights on how maternal psychosocial risk factors are related to child stress physiology, making for a truly rewarding experience.” – Dr. Olivia Silke

“This study uses a person-centered analytical approach to help clarify heterogeneous findings in the literature on stress reactivity and early life adversity in young children. A person-centered analytical approach may be more appropriate for (a) identifying HPA and SNS patterns in young children and (b) associating these dynamic patterns of change with known risk factors.” – Dr. Shauna Simon

Patterns of stress-related change in salivary alpha-amylase and cortisol among young children: Associations with maternal psychosocial risk factors

Silke, O., Simon, S. G., Sosnowski, D. W., Johnson, S. B., Granger, D. A., & Riis, J. L. (2024) Psychoneuroendocrinology

ABSTRACT: Our understanding of associations between family-level risk factors and children’s stress physiology is largely derived from studies that apply “mean-based” rather than “person-level” approaches. In this study, we employed group-based trajectory modeling, a person-centered approach, to identify children with similar patterns of stress-related sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation, and explored associations between these patterns and maternal psychosocial risk. Participants were five-year-old children (N=147; 52 % female; 62 % Black/African American) and their mothers. Children’s saliva was sampled four times during a series of emotional stressor tasks and later assayed for sAA and cortisol, indexing SNS and HPA activity, respectively. Mothers reported their depressive and anxiety symptoms, parenting stress, financial stress, and income. Results revealed two task-related patterns of change for sAA (Low-Stable vs. High-Increasing) and cortisol (Low-Stable vs. High-Decreasing) concentrations. Children from families with lower income were more likely to exhibit the High-Increasing SNS pattern, [OR=0.78, 95 % CI (0.64, 0.95)], and children of mothers reporting more anxiety symptoms [OR=1.06, 95 % CI (1.00, 1.12)] and more parenting stress [OR=1.04, 95 % CI (1.00, 1.07)] were more likely to show the High-Decreasing HPA pattern. Implications of this person-centered approach and findings for advancing our understanding of associations between family-level risk factors and children’s stress physiology are discussed.

Keywords:  Anxiety; Depression; Group-based trajectory modeling; Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis; Saliva; Sympathetic nervous system.