The following is a summary of “Association between depression and the cortisol awakening response is moderated by loneliness in men from a non-clinical sample,” published in the February 2024 issue of Endocrinology by Stańczykiewicz, et al.
Cortisol amounts in people with sadness or depressed signs have been studied in the past, but the results have been mixed. Some people think that the fact that it’s hard to apply results from different studies in this area could be because people with depression show different signs in different clinical and social settings.
For a study, researchers sought to see if there was a link between morning cortisol levels and depressed symptoms in a group of healthy young men, taking into account how lonely they felt.
They thought that the amount of loneliness might weaken the link between morning cortisol levels and depressed symptoms. About 102 people (mean age: 29.9 ± 5.0 years) filled out surveys that asked about their levels of anxiety and depression symptoms, stress, and loneliness. Four samples of saliva taken in the morning were used to measure cortisol levels. There were strong links between the cortisol awakening reaction (CAR), mean increase in cortisol levels during the measurement period (MnInc) and the levels of loneliness and depressed symptoms. Also, a strong link was found between the depressed symptoms caused by loneliness and the CAR and the MnInc. In particular, the link between depressed symptoms and the CAR and the MnInc seemed strong and bad when people felt very lonely.
Men who didn’t feel lonely looked at the CAR, there was no significant link between depressed symptoms and it. No important links were found between depressed symptoms, loneliness, or the way loneliness affected depressive symptoms and cortisol levels at waking.
The results of the study showed how important social situations are for understanding the link between changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and men’s depressed symptoms.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306453023009022
