The effect of maternal salivary cortisol level on child nutrition status

Open Access
- Author:
- Pohl, Allison Amanda
- Area of Honors:
- Nutritional Sciences
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Katarzyna Kordas, Thesis Supervisor
Rebecca L Corwin, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Salivary cortisol
child nutrition
maternal stress
HPA axis - Abstract:
- There is a unique connection between a mother and child that is unlike any other human relationship. The biological mother is the sole caregiver that supports the child from conception, through gestation, and throughout childhood and subsequent developmental periods. While the mother acts to support her child socially, emotionally, and financially, it is her biological influence that initially shapes her child’s development. Specifically, the current study aims to address the role that maternal stress measured through salivary cortisol has on her child’s nutritional state, measured through height, weight, and hemoglobin status. Overall, 56 mother and child pairs from Montevideo, Uruguay were included in the study. Maternal saliva and child blood samples were collected over a period of several weeks. The saliva samples were then analyzed for cortisol content using the ELISA method (Salimetrics, State College, PA) (HemoCue, Lake Forrest, CA) and child blood samples were analyzed for hemoglobin content using a portable instrument. Area under the curve (AUC) calculations were used to average maternal cortisol concentrations based on the two days of collection and simple linear and logistic regressions were run with AUC as the independent variable and child nutritional status as the dependent variables. Models were covariant-adjusted for child age, child sex, whether the child lived with one or both parents and the mother’s age, years of schooling, maternal IQ score, depressive symptoms, stress, employment status, and finally, the parents’ marital status, SES score, housing occupant density, and HOME Inventory score. The average maternal cortisol concentrations (expressed as AUC) for Day 1 and Day 2 of collection were 96.16 ±72.01µg/dL and 98.74 ± 84.05µg/dL, respectively. There was not a statistical association between maternal salivary cortisol levels and child height, weight, or hemoglobin concentration. Overall, this study concludes that maternal stress measured through salivary cortisol did not influence child nutrition status. However, a large body of literature supports the effect that maternal stress plays in overall child development, thus, further studies with larger sample sizes are needed to clarify the results.