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 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 | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".