Uncovering Resilience: Hair as a Retrospective Biomarker of Health and Coping During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study proposes the use of a novel biomarker, hair cortisol level, to assess the effects of chronic stress on mental health and explore/exploit behavior in healthcare workers and control individuals. While traditional biomarkers such as saliva, blood, or urine only measure at a single point in time, hair provides a larger window of detection and allows for a retrospective and longitudinal assessment. Studying the effects of mandated social isolation and workplace exposures during the COVID-19 pandemic can provide insight into how loneliness and stress impact cognition, depression, anxiety, and how social connections and coping strategies may moderate symptoms. "Clinically, this knowledge would help provide us with the tools to understand how patients and clinicians find their resilience during the pandemic," said the study's lead researchers Alexander Herman, MD, PhD, and David Darrow, MD, MPH. "We are particularly concerned for our colleagues on the front lines. As the health care systems become increasingly overloaded, some are having to widen their scope of practice and work with inadequate PPE. This has led many to experience burnout, stress, fear, and fatigue. Some individuals will be more adversely affected than others, and we seek to understand why." The study's researchers hypothesize that healthcare workers with lower COVID-19 cortisol increases, relative to their stress exposure, exhibit healthier levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms and a greater propensity to explore in a multi-armed Bandit task. They propose that this pattern of physiology and behavior reflects individual resilience to stress during the pandemic.