Trier Social Stress Test in Indian Adolescents.

ABSTRACT

Objective: To test the Trier Social Stress Test for children (TSSTC) in a cohort of Indian adolescents. Design: Cohort study Setting: Holdsworth Memorial Hospital, Mysore, India. Participants: Adolescent children (N=273, 134 males; mean age 13.6 yrs) selected from an ongoing birth cohort; 269 completed the test. Intervention Performance of 5-minutes each of public- speaking and mental arithmetic tasks in front of two unfamiliar ‘evaluators’. Outcome measures: Salivary cortisol concentrations were measured at baseline and at regular intervals after the TSST-C. Continuous measurements of heart rate, finger blood pressure, stroke volume, cardiac output and systemic vascular resistance were carried out before, during and for 10 minutes after the TSSTC using a finger cuff. Results: Cortisol concentrations [mean increment (SD) 6.1 (6.9) ng/mL], heart rate [4.6 (10.1) bpm], systolic [24.2 (11.6) mmHg] and diastolic blood pressure [16.5 (7.3) mmHg], cardiac output [0.6 (0.7) L/min], stroke volume [4.0 (5.6) mL] and systemic vascular resistance [225 (282) dyn.s/cm5] increased significantly (P<0.001) from baseline after inducing stress. Conclusions: The TSST-C produces stress-responses in Indian adolescents of a sufficient magnitude to be a useful tool for examining stress physiology and its relationships to disease outcomes in this population.