November 17, 2010 – Finding burnout more quickly with a blood test or a saliva test will be a possibility in a few years. At least that’s what a small study suggests.1 conducted by researcher Robert-Paul Juster and Sonia Lupien, director of the Center for Research on Human Stress at Hôpital Louis-H. Lafontaine, who shows that burnout leaves easily detectable “biological” marks.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers subjected 30 workers to a questionnaire designed to assess their stress level. At the same time, they performed blood tests to measure 15 factors, including cholesterol and insulin levels, known to be linked to chronic stress. Thus, by combining these different “biomarkers”, the researchers were able to give each of the participants a score between 0 and 15 defining their “allostatic load”, which means, in a way, their rate of physiological wear related to stress. say again.
Using a saliva test, participants also had to measure their levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, 5 times during 2 days of work.
According to the results, the more people are stressed, the higher their allostatic load and their risk of burnout. These biological tests could therefore help doctors identify people at risk of burnout as soon as possible.
The symptoms of burnout are also associated with an abnormally low level of cortisol, which seems to be characteristic of this syndrome. Indeed, the decrease in the level of cortisol is not observed in the event of depression, and would thus make it possible to differentiate these two pathologies often put, wrongly, “in the same basket” by the doctors.
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1. Juster RP, Lupien S et al. A clinical allostatic load index is associated with burnout symptoms and hypocortisolemic profiles in healthy workers. Study to be published.