Stress takes many forms in daily life and ignoring high levels of stress can lead to serious and varied health problems including depression and Alzheimer’s disease. Being able to simply check your stress levels at home could provide many health benefits.
“We have been looking for a cost-effective diagnostic device for a long time,
easily used and accurately measures cortisol levels. This could make a considerable difference in public health but also for people’s quality of life.”
Devices currently available generally include electrodes that have low stability under different and fluctuating conditions, such as changes in pH and temperature. These devices therefore have reliability and a limited lifespan: equipped with reference electrodes with a silver layer which oxidizes easily and is unstable depending on the electrochemical environments, current cortisol detectors are unstable.
Iridium oxide nanoparticles could be a game changer: bioengineers use them here to cover the silver layer. This modification improves the stability, sensitivity and reproducibility of cortisol detection.
The result is a simple, inexpensive cortisol measuring device that detects cortisol molecules at a concentration 3,000 times lower than the normal range of cortisol in our blood. The new test device is therefore sufficiently sensitive for commercial use in the form of a home test.
The study confirms that electrodes modified with iridium oxide also improve the specificity of the test. A crucial point, while there is a great similarity between cortisol and other hormones such as progesterone, testosterone and corticosterone.
