Citation

Yonekura T, Takeda K, Shetty V, Yamaguchi M. J. Physiol. Sci. 2014; 64(4): 261-267.

Affiliation

Biomedical Engineering and Robotics Laboratory, Graduate School of Engineering, Iwate University, 4-3-5 Ueda, Morioka, 020-8551, Japan.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12576-014-0315-x

PMID

24744089

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the utility of salivary cortisol levels for screening mental states such as depression in adolescents following a natural disaster. We examined the relationship of salivary cortisol levels in adolescent survivors of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake with the depression subscale of the 28-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). Subjects were 63 adolescent survivors (age = 14.29 years ± 0.51) who were administered the GHQ and provided saliva samples thrice daily (morning, afternoon and evening) over the course of 3 days. Based on the GHQ-depression subscores, subjects were divided into low and high depression groups. About 22 % of the subjects were classified into the high symptom group. When data collected over 3 days were used, a significant difference was observed between the two groups in the salivary cortisol levels at the evening time point as well the ratio of the morning/evening levels (p < 0.05). Analyzed by means of receiver-operating characteristic curves, the morning/evening ratios showed a good power in discriminating between subjects with and without depressive symptoms. Our study suggests that repeated measurement of salivary cortisol levels over 3 days has utility in screening for depressive states in adolescents following a natural disaster.

Language: en