PURPOSE: Cortisol is frequently assayed as a stress-responsive biomarker which 
changes over the course of minutes to meet the demands of a person's social 
context. Salivary cortisol is often used as a noninvasive sampling method that 
possesses important health implications. A critical barrier to psychobiological 
research that involves salivary cortisol is a time delay of days to months 
before cortisol results are obtained via immunoassay, long after the person is 
no longer proximate to the social context in which they provided the sample. The 
present study was designed to address this critical barrier through creation of 
a lateral flow test (LFT) cortisol device capable of measuring salivary cortisol 
within minutes of sample collection. The LFT is frequently used within 
commercial point-of-care settings to obtain rapid answers to the 
presence/absence of a biomarker. The present study extends the LFT into the 
research domain by presenting performance characteristics of a quantitative LFT 
that measures salivary cortisol within 20 minutes of sample collection.
METHODS: Saliva samples from 29 adults (15 men) were obtained in the morning and 
afternoon by using Passive Drool and then the Super·SAL Extra Collection Device 
(hereafter Super·SAL) and later assayed with LFT and a commercially available 
enzyme immunoassay.
FINDINGS: Results indicate the LFT correlated well with these collection methods 
(R = 0.872 with Super · SAL, R = 0.739 with Passive Drool, P < 0.0001) and at 
comparable levels to correspondence of Super · SAL with Passive Drool (R = 
0.798, P < 0.0001) which were measured with the same assay.
IMPLICATIONS: These results open an exciting new possibility to integrate this 
technologic advance into stress research, including knowing and potentially 
changing the person's social context in a time-sensitive manner. Methodological 
improvements such as this have the possibility of refining conceptual models of 
stress reactivity and regulation.