Low Salivary Cortisol and Elevated Depressive Affect among Rural Men in Botswana: Reliability and Validity of Laboratory Results
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most research on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis function under aversive conditions has focused on relatively increased acute episodic, or chronic secretions as an operationalization of "stress." Severe or recurrent stress, perhaps in interaction with individual characteristics, results in chronically decreased HPA function among some persons suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Little evidence exists to assess the population distribution of chronic low cortisol in different free-ranging human populations, as a manifestation of past trauma or stress. This study reports findings of chronically depressed ambulatory salivary cortisol among rural-dwelling Batswana men (n=30) compared with men living in Gaborone (n=34), the capital of Botswana, based on repeated ambulatory sampling. Out of 914 saliva samples analyzed by radioimmunoassay, 268 (29.3%) samples (41 urban, 227 rural) were below the minimum detectable dose (<MDD of 0.034 ug/dL) of the assay. Low values were distributed across comparable times of day as were =MDD samples. There was significant clustering of low cortisol within individuals; percentage of intra-individual repeats that were <MDD ranged from zero to 94.1% for rural participants (median=59.8%; mean=54.8%; SD=27.8%), and from zero to 40% for urban (median=0%; mean=8%; SD=11.9%). There was no association between number of repeats and proportion <MDD (P[F=-0.47]=0.639; beta(1)=-0.0045+/-0.0019). Examination of laboratory quality control suggests that this pattern is not a result of measurement error, or poor sample preservation, but instead reflects a difference from residing in a remote rural versus a central urban community.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".