The Relationship between Cortisol Activity during Cognitive Task and Posttraumatic Stress Symptom Clusters

Hongxia Duan, Li Wang, Liang Zhang, Jing Liu, Kan Zhang and Jianhui Wu

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 12, 1-13

Abstract: Background: The latest development in the dimensional structure of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a novel 6-factor model, which builds on the newly released DSM-5. One notable gap in the literature is that little is known about how distinct symptom clusters of PTSD are related to hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis activity when people perform a relatively less stressful cognitive task. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between cortisol activity when individuals perform cognitive tasks in the laboratory and a contemporary phenotypic model of posttraumatic stress symptomatology in earthquake survivors. Methods: Salivary cortisol while performing cognitive tasks was collected and analyzed in 89 adult earthquake survivors. The PTSD Checklist for the DSM-5 (PCL-5) was used to assess the severity of total PTSD as well as six distinct symptom clusters. Regression analyses were conducted to examine the associations between the six distinct PTSD symptom clusters and cortisol profiles. Results: The results showed that the score of the negative affect symptom cluster, but not anhedonia or other clusters, was positively associated with cortisol levels before and during the cognitive tasks. Conclusion: The results showed that higher cortisol levels before and during cognitive tasks might be specifically linked to a distinct symptom cluster of PTSD—negative affect symptomatology. This suggests that a distinction should be made between negative affect and anhedonia symptom clusters, as the 6-factor model proposed.

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0144315 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 44315&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0144315

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0144315

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).