title: Reproducibility of skeletal muscle vasodilatation responses to Stroop mental challenge over repeated sessions.
abstract: Skeletal muscle blood flow responses to stress have implications for psychobiological disease pathways. An important assumption underlying psychophysiological studies relating stress reactivity with disease risk is that individuals are characterized by stable response profiles that can be reliably assessed using acute psychophysiological stress testing. We examined the reproducibility of forearm vasodilatation, blood pressure, and cardiac responses to a 2 min Stroop mental challenge over two repeated stress sessions that were on average 3.6 months apart. Participants were 21 healthy men and women (aged 21.8+/-3.7 years). Vasodilatation, blood pressure and heart rate responses displayed no habituation between sessions, although there was significantly greater cardiac parasympathetic involvement during the second testing session. Significant test-retest correlations between the sessions were observed for both forearm blood flow and heart rate reactivity. These findings demonstrate skeletal muscle vasodilatation responses to repeated stress are robust, so may be a useful psychophysiological indicator in studies of stress reactivity and disease risk.
authors.affiliation: Psychobiology Group, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, 1-19 Torrington Place, London, UK. m.hamer@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hamer
authors.forename: Yati N
authors.initials: YN
authors.lastname: Boutcher
authors.forename: Young
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Stephen H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Boutcher
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000313:Adrenal Medulla / Q000502:physiology; D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001783:Blood Flow Velocity / Q000502:physiology; D001794:Blood Pressure / Q000502:physiology; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005542:Forearm / Q000098:blood supply; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic / Q000502:physiology*; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D018482:Muscle, Skeletal / Q000098:blood supply*; D010275:Parasympathetic Nervous System / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D013564:Sympathetic Nervous System / Q000502:physiology; D014664:Vasodilation / Q000502:physiology*