Associations Among Hair Cortisol Concentrations, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Status, and Amygdala Reactivity to Negative Affective Stimuli in Female Police Officers.

"The study was supported by ZonMw, the Netherlands organization for Health Research and Development (40‐00812‐98‐10041), and by a grant from the Academic Medical Center Research Council (110614) to MO. Additionally, author MvZ was supported by a Veni grant from ZonMw (91617037) and a Brain and Behavior Research Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Grant (24928). Author EFCvR was supported by an Erasmus MC research fellowship, a Netherlands Brain Foundation fellowship (F2011[1]‐12), and a Vidi grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (91716453). The funding sources had no involvement in the study design; data collection, analysis and interpretation; manuscript preparation; or decision to submit for publication. The authors gratefully acknowledge Renée Hutter, Gré Westerveld, Marthe Hoofwijk and other colleagues of the PDC outpatient clinic for their assistance in participant recruitment and data collection."

"Participants were recruited through a diagnostic outpatient center for police personnel (PDC; Diemen, the Netherlands; n = 3 participants with PTSD) and advertisements (n = 11 participants with PTSD and all TCs). All participants provided verbal and written informed consent prior to study initiation. At baseline, inclusion and exclusion criteria were assessed using diagnostic clinical interviews and self‐report questionnaires. For patients recruited via the diagnostic outpatient center, clinical interviews administered during intake were used. After inclusion, participants completed two scanning sessions (described later). Participants were asked to abstain from alcohol and drugs 24 hr before scanning and from rigorous exercise, beverages except water, and nicotine for 2.5 hr before scanning. Prior to scanning, intranasal oxytocin (40 IU) and a placebo (0.9% saline) were administered in a randomized double‐blind crossover design. For this study, we only included imaging data collected under placebo. For most participants (i.e., 10 participants with PTSD who completed scanning, 90.1%; and 11 TCs, 73.3%), scalp hair for HCC determination was collected before trial medication administration. We found that HCC did not significantly differ between TCs whose samples were collected prior to versus after trial medication administration, t(13) =−0.81, p = .431. The average time in days between hair collection and placebo scan did not significantly differ between groups (Table ). The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Amsterdam University Medical Centers, location Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and was registered in the Netherlands Trial Registry (NTR3516)."