2024-03-14, Grafinger, Katharina, Kassis, Wassilis, Favre, Céline Anne, Aksoy, Dilan, Gaugler, Stefan

In previous studies, various steroids have been associated with stress and have therefore been quantified to investigate stress‐related questions. Since the main stress‐related steroid cortisol follows a circadian rhythm, often hair is analysed to quantify this steroid. Further, hair analysis gives the unique possibility of long‐time monitoring by analysing a certain segment of hair, since hair grows on average 1 cm per month. Hair is a difficult matrix due to the complex sample preparation with many steps including washing and grinding, followed by various extraction steps. Additionally, steroids are endogenous and are therefore present in the hair matrix. Hence, no analyte free matrix is available, which is needed for the quantification via external calibrators. To overcome this problem, the so‐called surrogate methods can be used, for which a 13 C 3 labelled or deuterated reference compound of the steroid of interest is used for quantification. In the present study, a surrogate method was developed and fully validated for the quantitative analysis of seven steroids in human hair. Validation experiments showed that the method is further suitable for semi‐quantitative analysis of estradiol. However, it is not suitable for the analysis of androsterone and DHEAS. The method was successfully used to analyse steroids in a comprehensive study of 360 adolescent hair samples, enabling research into stress markers.

2024, Kassis, Wassilis, Aksoy, Dilan, Favre, Céline Anne, Arnold, Julia, Gaugler, Stefan, Grafinger, Katharina, Artz, Sibylle, Magnuson, Doug

Introduction: To understand the family’s role in adolescents’ mental health development and the connection to neurodevelopmental disorders related to experienced parental physical abuse, we first explored resilience pathways longitudinally and secondly, connected the identified patterns to adolescents’ hair cortisol levels that are rooted in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis as the main stress response system and connected brain structure alterations. Methods: We analyzed longitudinal online questionnaire data for three consecutive high school years (from seventh to ninth grade) and four survey waves from a representative sample of n = 1609 high school students in Switzerland on violence–resilience pathways. Furthermore, we collected students’ hair samples from a subsample of n = 229 at survey wave 4. About 30% of the participating adolescents had been physically abused by their parents. Out of the overall sample, we drew a subsample of adolescents with parental abuse experiences (survey wave 1 n = 509; survey wave 2 n = 506; survey wave 3 n = 561; survey wave 4 n = 560). Results: Despite the odds, about 20–30% of adolescents who have experienced parental physical abuse escaped the family violence cycle and can be called resilient. By applying a person-oriented analytical approach via latent class and transition analysis, we longitudinally identified and compared four distinct violence–resilience patterns. We identified violence resilience as a multidimensional latent construct, which includes hedonic and eudaimonic protective and risk indicators. Because resilience should not solely be operationalized based on the lack of psychopathology, our latent construct included both feeling good (hedonic indicators such as high levels of self-esteem and low levels of depression/anxiety and dissociation) and doing well (eudaimonic indicators such as high levels of self-determination and self-efficacy as well as low levels of aggression toward peers). Discussion: The present study confirmed that higher cortisol levels significantly relate to the comorbid pattern (internalizing and externalizing symptoms), and further confirmed the presence of lasting alterations in brain structures. In this way, we corroborated the insight that when studying the resilience pathways and trajectories of abused adolescents, biological markers such as hair cortisol significantly enhance and deepen the understanding of the longitudinal mechanisms of psychological markers (e.g., self-determination, self-esteem, self-efficacy) that are commonly applied in questionnaires.