The effect of adverse childhood experience on heart rate variability and salivary cortisol

Abstract

Adverse childhood exposure has been discovered might alter physiological processes such as cardiovascular stress response. When the body is in a stressful condition, it triggers two primary systems that are particularly involved in adapting the body to the stress: the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenocorticol (HPA) axis. To detect the altered stress response, biomarkers that represent both systems: ANS and HPA are proposed. Among the available biomarkers, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) has been proven as a powerful biomarker that represents ANS. Meanwhile, salivary cortisol has been suggested as a biomarker that reflects the HPA. This study will investigate the stress response on individual who have had adverse childhood experience and no adverse childhood experience by using HRV and salivary cortisol. Electrocardiograph and salivary cortisol were collected from 23 healthy participants (age, 19 to 23 years old), 12 participants who had adverse childhood experience while the remaining 11 acted as the control group. The recording session was done during a Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT). HRV was then computed from the ECG and the HRV features were extracted. From the result, it can be seen that irregular stress response detected by HRV and salivary cortisol was found associated with adverse childhood experience with moderate classification performance; accuracy 61.7% and 59.4% respectively. To achieve a better classifier performance, an approach to the fusion method for stress response detection of adverse childhood experience is proposed for the future study.