Cortisol Responses Among Volunteer And Paid-on-call Firefighters Responding To Calls At Night
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To examine salivary cortisol flux as a marker of stress among volunteer and paid-on-call firefighters responding to nighttime calls (1900-0700). METHODS: Eight Firefighters (36.9 ± 12.1 years; BMI 28.2 ± 2.7 kg/m2) with an average tenure of 9.5 ± 8.1 years provided saliva samples for cortisol analysis at three time points: on dispatch to a call (PRE), on return from a call (CALL), and within 15-minutes upon waking following a night of no call response (NoCALL). Four of eight firefighters attended multiple calls on their night of call response which were separated by periods of sleep; three of these four participants were awake for their first call. Saliva samples were subsequently processed via enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Comparisons were made using a repeated measures ANOVA with confirmation of normality, sphericity, and the employment of a Bonferroni correction. RESULTS: Salivary cortisol increased from PRE (mean value: 0.116 μg/L, 95%CI: 0.063-0.169 μg/dL) in both CALL (mean: 0.531 μg/L; 95%CI: 0.393-0.666 μg/dL; p< .001) and NoCALL (mean: 0.437 μg/L; 95%CI: 0.395-0.478 μg/dL; p< .001 ) conditions. No differences were observed between CALL and NoCALL (mean difference: 0.094 μg/dL; 95%CI: -.082-.269 μg/dL; p=0.480). Post-hoc correction for only calls in which a firefighter was sleeping trended towards but did not achieve significance between CALL and NoCALL (p=.084). The flux induced by the CALL condition occurred during the quiescence of the cortisol response rather than during the ordinary progressive increase in cortisol concentration that proceeds and persists for a period beyond waking up. Thus, there is a sharper response, ie. greater rate of change, and disruption of the hormone’s normal circadian rhythm with CALL conditions. Previous findings note a suppressive effect of firefighter call response on final waking cortisol awakening response (CAR), supporting circadian perturbation. CONCLUSION: Firefighters responding to nighttime call response during the quiescent stage of cortisol’s circadian rhythm experience a cortisol flux comparable to that of a normal CAR. This ultimately disrupts the normal circadian rhythm, leading to attenuated final waking CAR and a greater period of time with elevated cortisol levels.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".