Stress Hormone Linked to Cardiovascular Disease Risk

Often utilized as a diagnostic to gauge long-term patterns in accumulated toxins, hair samples may serve as an indicator of a person’s risks of cardiovascular disease.  Laura Manenschijn, from Erasmus Medical Center (The Netherlands), and colleagues took hair samples from sample of 283 older men and women, median age 75 years, who were part of the Dutch cohort study called the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA). Proposing that measuring cortisol in hair provides a way to study long-term cortisol exposure and thus a 3-cm sample of scalp hair can capture information about how cortisol levels change over a three-month period, the team found that subjects with hair cortisol levels in the highest quartile were at a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular disease, as compared to those in the lowest quartile.   As well, high hair cortisol levels were associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus.   The study authors conclude that: “The increased cardiovascular risk we found is equivalent to the effect of traditional cardiovascular risk factors, suggesting that long-term elevated cortisol may be an important cardiovascular risk factor.”