Health Enhancement And Resilience Training (HEART)

University of California San Francisco (UCSF)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Aging; Well-being; Stress

Treatments: Behavioral: Stress-reduction class

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01959126

10-02063

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this research study is to examine whether a stress reduction intervention can improve health, mood and biological markers of cellular stress and aging in a group of chronically-stressed maternal caregivers and healthy maternal controls.

Full description

This stress-reduction intervention was added into an ongoing observational study in May of 2013. The parent study is a prospective cohort study of the effects of chronic stress in a group of maternal caregivers with children on the autism spectrum and healthy controls whose children have no diagnosis. Study participants are being invited to enroll in a 12-week stress reduction course based on the principles of mindfulness. They will attend four six-hour workshops and participate in 12 weekly hour-long web video conferencing calls to reinforce what is taught in the workshops.

At the beginning and the end of the intervention, they complete self-report measures of psychological well-being and give saliva samples. Since the women are also participating in the longitudinal study, we have other before and after data for them. These include psycho-social measures, body measurements, psycho-physiology measurements, cognitive tests, actigraphy (for sleep), as well as saliva (for hormones), hair (for hormones) and blood (for telomeres, telomerase, gene expression, circulating hormones, inflammation and oxidative stress).

Enrollment: 70 patients

Sex: Female

Ages: 20 to 50 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Must have at least one child between 2 and 16 at time of enrollment
• Caregivers must have a child diagnosed in that age range diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.
• Controls must have a healthy child in that age range. All women must be

Exclusion criteria

• Chronic disease, including recent history of cancer
• History of psychiatric disorder, such as bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder
• Medications, including statins, anti-anxiety drugs, and for controls only anti-depressants.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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70 participants in 1 patient group

Stress-reduction class

Experimental group

Description:

Study participants enrolled in a 12-week stress reduction course based on the principles of mindfulness. They attended four six-hour workshops and participated in 12 weekly hour-long web video conferencing calls to reinforce what was taught in the workshops. We have two groups: chronically-stressed maternal caregivers of children on the autism spectrum and control mothers whose children have no significant psychiatric or physical impairment.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Stress-reduction class