0123 Cortisol, Sleep And Heart Rate Variability In Resting Neurotypical And Autistic Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Individuals with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are reported to display high sympathetic activity and atypical diurnal cortisol secretion patterns. We compared evening and morning cortisol levels in ASD and typically developing (TD) adults and explored the association between cortisol, sleep and heart rate variability (HRV). Sixteen unmedicated ASD adults (22.0 ± 3.7 years, 15M, 1F) without sleep complaints, intellectual disability and psychiatric nor neurological comorbidity were compared to 17 TD healthy participants (21.7 ± 4.0 years, 16M, 1F). Salivary cortisol was sampled in the evening (n=5) and morning (n=2), 20 minutes apart. Sleep latency, nocturnal awakenings, total sleep time and sleep efficiency were assessed by self-reports. The electrocardiogram was recorded in the evening and in the morning to compute low (LF) and high (HF) spectral frequencies. Cortisol and HRV parameters were compared using two-way ANOVAs (ASD vs TD X evening vs morning). Sleep parameters were compared between the 2 groups using independent Mann-Whitney U tests. Pearson correlations between cortisol levels, sleep measures and HRV parameters were calculated. Groups did not differ on cortisol levels. Compared to the TD group, ASD self-reports showed longer sleep latencies (38.6 ± 12.6 vs 13.3 ± 2.3 minutes; p<0.01), longer nocturnal awakenings (11.6 ± 3.3 vs 2.5 ± 0.8 minutes; p<0.01), lower sleep efficiencies (90.2 ± 3.3 vs 95.3 ± 1.6 %; p=0.01) but same total sleep time (7.9 ± 0.3 vs 8.0 ± 0.2 hours). Morning HF values were higher in ASD than TD (p=0.05). In the TD group, higher evening cortisol levels correlated with longer nocturnal awakenings (r=0.7; p=0.02); higher morning cortisol levels correlated with longer total sleep time (r=0.7; p=0.02), lower morning LF (r=-0.9; p=0.002) and higher morning HF (r=0.9; p=0.002). No significant correlations were found in the ASD group. Only the TD group showed significant correlations between cortisol levels, sleep and HRV. The lack of significant correlations in the ASD group could reflect the presence of poor self-reported sleep despite the lack of complaints or an alternative coupling between neuronal and endocrine mechanisms of sleep control in ASD. Canadian Institutes of Health Research; “Fonds de la recherche du Québec en santé”.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".