Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Parkville, Vic 3052, Australia; Centre for Community Child Health, The Royal Children's Hospital, Parkville, Vic 3052, Australia; Department of Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic 3052, Australia.
Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Parkville, Vic 3052, Australia; Department of Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic 3052, Australia; The Royal Children's Hospital, Parkville, Vic 3052, Australia.
Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2021 May;127:105176. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2021.105176. Epub 2021 Feb 20.
Psychosocial and socioeconomic adversity in early childhood (termed 'social adversity') can have lifelong detrimental effects on health and development. Physiological stress is one proposed mechanism by which social adversity 'gets under the skin'. There is substantial research interest in whether hair cortisol, a biomarker proposed to measure the cumulative physiological stress response over time, can illustrate this mechanism. As a result, a growing number of studies have tested for associations between indicators of social adversity and child hair cortisol. The aim of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive, systematic review of the evidence for associations between indicators of social adversity and hair cortisol, specifically in young children (birth to 8 years) published any time up to 31 December 2019. The literature search identified 44 published studies that met inclusion criteria. The studies examined associations between one or more indicators of social adversity and child hair cortisol across 35 independent cohorts comprising 8370 children. Indicators of adversity examined in the identified literature included socioeconomic factors (e.g. low parental education, low income and unemployment), psychosocial factors (e.g. parent stress, poor mental health and family violence), and children's direct exposure to maltreatment, abuse and stressful events. Across all indicators of adversity, a total of 142 associations with hair cortisol were examined. Evidence of associations was limited and inconsistent; 34/142 (24%) showed evidence of a positive association between adversity and higher hair cortisol, 8/142 (6%) showed a negative association, and more than two thirds (100/142, 70%) of all examined associations were null. The collective evidence appears insufficient to conclude that there is a relationship between social adversity and hair cortisol, as a measure of physiological stress response, in young children.
儿童早期的心理社会和社会经济逆境（称为“社会逆境”）会对健康和发育产生终身的不利影响。生理应激是社会逆境“深入皮肤”的一种 proposed 机制。人们对头发皮质醇（一种被提议用来衡量随时间推移累积生理应激反应的生物标志物）是否能够说明这一机制非常感兴趣。因此，越来越多的研究测试了社会逆境指标与儿童头发皮质醇之间的关联。本文的目的是对截至 2019 年 12 月 31 日发表的关于社会逆境指标与儿童头发皮质醇之间关联的证据进行全面、系统的 review。文献检索确定了 44 项符合纳入标准的已发表研究。这些研究在 35 个独立队列中检验了社会逆境的一个或多个指标与儿童头发皮质醇之间的关联，这些队列包括 8370 名儿童。已确定文献中检查的逆境指标包括社会经济因素（例如，父母教育程度低、收入低和失业）、心理社会因素（例如，父母压力、心理健康状况不佳和家庭暴力）以及儿童直接遭受虐待、虐待和压力事件。在所有逆境指标中，共检验了 142 个与头发皮质醇相关的关联。关联证据有限且不一致；142 个关联中有 34 个（24%）显示逆境与更高的头发皮质醇之间存在正相关，8 个（6%）显示负相关，超过三分之二（100/142，70%）的所有检验关联均为 null。总体证据似乎不足以得出结论，即社会逆境与头发皮质醇之间存在关系，头发皮质醇作为生理应激反应的一种衡量标准，在幼儿中。
