Early post-conception maternal cortisol, children’s HPAA activity and DNA methylation profiles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPAA) plays a critical role in the functioning of all other biological systems. Thus, studying how the environment may influence its ontogeny is paramount to understanding developmental origins of health and disease. The early post-conceptional (EPC) period could be particularly important for the HPAA as the effects of exposures on organisms' first cells can be transmitted through all cell lineages. We evaluate putative relationships between EPC maternal cortisol levels, a marker of physiologic stress, and their children's pre-pubertal HPAA activity (n=22 dyads). Maternal first-morning urinary (FMU) cortisol, collected every-other-day during the first 8 weeks post-conception, was associated with children's FMU cortisol collected daily around the start of the school year, a non-experimental challenge, as well as salivary cortisol responses to an experimental challenge (all Ps5% change in children's buccal epithelial cells' DNA methylation for 867 sites, while children's HPAA activity was associated with five CpG sites. Yet, no CpG sites were related to both, EPC cortisol and children's HPAA activity. Thus, these epigenetic modifications did not statistically mediate the observed physiological links. Larger, prospective peri-conceptional cohort studies including frequent bio-specimen collection from mothers and children will be required to replicate our analyses and, if our results are confirmed, identify biological mechanisms mediating the statistical links observed between maternal EPC cortisol and children's HPAA activity.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 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".