Associations between hair cortisol and blood pressure: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Objective: Stress is widely considered to be a risk factor for high blood pressure (BP), but evidence on the associations between biomarkers of chronic stress and BP is inconsistent. This systematic review and meta-analysis assessed the current state of the science on relationships between measures of cortisol concentration reflecting chronic stress exposure [hair cortisol concentration (HCC), nail cortisol concentration)] and BP.

Methods: PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and Embase were searched.