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Medicine› Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine› Cardiovascular Health and Disease Prevention

Pediatric cardiovascular risk — Childhood stress and depressive symptoms

Submitted 2026-10-23

Field: Medicine › Cardiology and Cardiovascular MedicineType: No effect foundArea: pediatric cardiovascular riskTarget: Childhood stress and depressive symptomsStage: full study

Hypothesis

Children who report more stress and depressive symptoms would have poorer blood vessel lining (endothelial) function by adolescence, as found in adults.

What failed

Following 203 children from age 7 to 16, the authors found no cross-sectional or long-term link between stress or depressive symptoms and endothelial function (all p > .05).

Broken assumption

Psychological stress in childhood already harms blood vessel function by adolescence.

Why

All relationships pointed in the expected direction, but none was significant in this healthy group without symptoms.

From the published paper: OLIVE et al. PLoS ONE, 2018. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

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Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.