From the inside it’s not hard to know if you’re stressed. You may feel restless, notice that your shoulders or jaw are tense, that you may have headaches or even be awake at night.
But, from the outside, it’s a little harder to objectively measure stress and, in turn, know how to deal with it. But that could soon change.
Scientists have just published a paper reporting the creation of an electronic chip that can be carried to analyze the stress that a particular hormone detects in sweat.
“Having a reliable and usable system can help doctors objectively quantify whether a patient is suffering from depression or exhaustion, for example, and whether their treatment is effective,” says Adrian Ionescu, lead author and nanotechnology researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne.
“In addition, doctors would have this information available in real time. This would mean a big step forward in understanding these diseases.”
The chip tracks the hormone cortisol, a steroid hormone that we have long known is released by the adrenal glands in response to physiological stress, including physical tension or low blood glucose.
When your body releases cortisol, triggering the stressful sensations we all know, it can be detected in saliva, sweat and urine.
“Cortisol can be secreted by impulse: you feel good and suddenly something happens that puts you in stress and your body starts producing more of the hormone,” Ionescu says.
The patch works by using an expanded gate field effect transistor (EG-FET) made of graphene to analyze small amounts of cortisol in our sweat. The transistor uses short fragments of DNA that bind to cortisol, dragging the hormone closer to the sensor.
This may seem excessive to the lucky ones to avoid persistent stress; after all, from time to time we all stress. But when stress levels remain high, also known as chronic stress, they can cause several problems.
“Disorders such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, allergy, anxiety, depression, fatigue syndrome and burnout are often associated with dysfunctions of the axes of ‘stress,’ the team wrote in their work.
The team expects the patch to be able to record cortisol levels for an entire day, which will show if the patient has a normal cortisol curve or if something is wrong.
“Cortisol level has a circadian rhythm in the serum throughout the day, with the highest level in the morning (~ 30 minutes after waking up, 0.14-0.69 µM) and the lowest level at night (0.083 -0.36 µM) Maintaining stress can alter this rhythm and cause an abnormal increase in cortisol levels, “the team wrote.
“Although short-term activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is adaptive and necessary for daily life, both high and low cortisol levels, as well as altered circadian rhythms, are involved in physical and psychological disorders “.
You still can’t go out and look for one of these stress patches, but the team hopes to test the sensor soon in a hospital trial. Take a look at this space.
The document has been published in Communication materials.