Research Measures Links to Stress and Death in Female Baboons
A new study appearing in Science Advances shows that female baboons with high life-long levels of glucocorticoids, the hormones involved in the ‘fight or flight’ response, have a greater risk of dying than those with lower levels. To understand the relationship between stress responses and survival, scientists studied 242 female baboons in Amboseli National Park, in Kenya. For more than 20 years, they measured glucocorticoid levels in the baboons’ feces, a task that drew upon one of the world’s largest collections of data from a wild primate population.
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.