From the inside it’s not hard to tell if you’re stressed. You may feel restless, notice your shoulders or jaw tense, have a headache, or even stay awake at night.
But, from the outside, it is a little harder to objectively measure stress and, in turn, to know how to treat it. But that could change soon.
Scientists have just published a paper reporting the creation of a portable electronic chip that can analyze how stressed you are by detecting a particular hormone in sweat.
“With a reliable, portable system, you can help doctors objectively quantify whether a patient is suffering from depression or exhaustion, for example, and whether their treatment is effective,” says lead author and nanotechnology researcher Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Adrian Ionescu.
“Moreover, doctors would have this information in real time. This would mark a major step forward in understanding these diseases. “
The chip tracks the hormone cortisol – a steroid hormone we have known for a long time is released by the adrenal glands in response to physiological stress, including physical stress or low blood glucose.
When your body releases cortisol, triggering those stressed feelings that we are all familiar with, it can be detected in saliva, sweat and urine.
“Cortisol can be secreted on impulse – you feel good and suddenly something happens that puts you under stress and your body starts to produce more of the hormone,” says Ionescu.
The patch works using an extended 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, pulling the hormone closer to the sensor.
This may seem excessive to those lucky enough to avoid persistent stress – after all, we all stress from time to time. But when stress levels remain high – also known as chronic stress – it can lead to a variety of problems.
“Disorders such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, allergy, anxiety, depression, fatigue syndrome and exhaustion are often associated with dysfunctions of the stress axes,” the team wrote in their paper.
The team hopes that the patch will be able to record cortisol levels throughout the day, which will show if the patient has a normal cortisol curve or if something is wrong.
“Cortisol levels have a circadian rhythm in the serum throughout the day, with the highest level in the morning (~ 30 min after waking up, 0.14-0.69 µM) and the lowest level at night (0.083-0, 36 µM). stress can disrupt this rhythm and lead to 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 disturbed circadian rhythms, are involved in physical and psychological disorders.”
You can’t go out and get one of these stress patches yet quite a bit, but the team hopes to test the sensor in a hospital trial soon. Look at this space.
The paper was published in Communication materials.