The Combined Dexamethasone/TSST Paradigm – A New Method for Psychoneuroendocrinology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The two main physiological systems involved in the regulation of the stress response are the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). However, the interaction of these systems on the stress response remains poorly understood. To better understand the cross-regulatory effects of the different systems involved in stress regulation, we developed a new stress paradigm that keeps the activity of the HPA constant when exposing subjects to psychosocial stress. Thirty healthy male participants were recruited and randomly assigned to either a dexamethasone (DEX; n = 15) or placebo (PLC; n = 15) group. All subjects were instructed to take the Dexamethasone (2 mg) or Placebo pill the night before coming to the laboratory to undergo the Trier Social Stress Task (TSST). Salivary cortisol, salivary alpha amylase (sAA), heart rate, blood pressure and subjective stress were assessed throughout the protocol. As expected, the DEX group presented with suppressed cortisol levels. In comparison, their heart rate was elevated by approximately ten base points compared to the PLC group, with increases throughout the protocol and during the TSST. Neither sAA, nor systolic or diastolic blood pressures showed significant group differences. Subjective stress levels significantly increased from baseline, and were found to be higher before and after the TSST after DEX compared to placebo. These results demonstrate a significant interaction between the HPA and the SNS during acute stress. The SNS activity was found to be elevated in the presence of a suppressed HPA axis, with some further effects on subjective levels of stress. The method to suppress the HPA prior to inducing stress was found to completely reliable, without any adverse side effects. Therefore, we propose this paradigm as a new method to investigate the interaction of the two major stress systems in the regulation of the stress response.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".