Hair cortisol concentration (HCC) reflects the long‐term activity of the hypothalamus‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) axis in response to stress. Brain‐derived neurotrophic factor DNA methylation (BDNF DNA M ) may affect HCC, and sex and Val66Met may contribute to this association. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the associations between HCC and Brain‐derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) DNA M , and the moderating effects of Val66Met and sex. We recruited 191 healthy young participants (96 women, mean age 23.0 ± 2.6 years) and collected body samples to evaluate HCC, and to determine BDNF DNA M and Val66Met genotypes. We analyzed the effects of BDNF DNA M , sex, and Val66Met on HCC. We also evaluated the associations between BDNF DNA M and HCC in groups separated by sex and genotypes. We found a marked association of BDNF DNA M with HCC across men and women. After dividing the data by sex, a positive correlation of HCC with BDNF DNA M was found only in women. There was no substantial moderation effect of Val66Met genotypes on the association between BDNF DNA M and HCC. Therefore, BDNF DNA M was found to have positive association with HCC only in healthy young women, indicating that sex moderates the association of BDNF DNA M with long‐term HPA axis activity.
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Li et al. (2024) studied this question.
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