The negative impact stress has on health and performance is well documented. Consequently, stress assessment and mitigation strategies are the subject of ongoing study. Cortisol is often considered the gold-standard biomarker in clinical sciences and psychology, and cortisol levels are commonly measured to assess stress levels in humans and animals.
Recently, a study by Balters et al. investigated salivary cortisol to determine if this non-invasive method is a valid metric for measuring stress in critical incident training and emergency scenarios on a ship bridge. In the study, saliva was collected from subjects experiencing low- and high-stress marine navigation simulations. Cortisol levels were measured using Arbor Assays’ Cortisol ELISA Kit (K003-H1) and compared to metrics like heart rate and its variability.
The results clearly validated salivary cortisol as a successful and valuable tool for detecting distress in critical high-stress and emergency situations. Salivary cortisol strongly correlated with standard stress assessments and provided additional objective information about the psycho-physiological stress response.
OUR CORTISOL ELISA KIT (K003-H1/H5):
- Measure Cortisol in 90 minutes
- Use saliva, fecal extracts, urine, serum, plasma, and TCM from multiple species
- Cited in over 100 publications
- Each kit contains enough reagents for 39 or 231 samples in duplicate
- Includes stable 4˚C liquid reagents