Psychoneuroimmunology. Hypothesis and current research. Advances in biological psychiatry, Volume 20. edited by B. Sperner-Unterweger, W. W. Fleischhacker, W. P. Kaschka. Karger: Basel, 2001. ISBN: 3-8055-7262-X
✍ Scribed by Thomas J. Connor
- Book ID
- 102263414
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 26 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0885-6222
- DOI
- 10.1002/hup.389
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Psychoneuroimmunology is a rapidly developing field concerned with bi-directional interactions between the brain and the immune system. A growing body of evidence suggests that both exposure to life stressors and psychiatric illness may influence disease susceptibility by altering immunocompetence. Conversely, evidence also indicates that an inappropriate activation of the inflammatory arm of the immune system may play a causal role in the pathophysiology of disorders such as depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease.
This book is a product of the 6th Expert Meeting on Psychoimmunology held in Innsbruck, Austria in January 2000. The volume is a collaborative work of 56 international experts, with 14 chapters devoted to examining immunological changes in depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. The section devoted to schizophrenia examines the effects of both the disease itself, and anti psychotic drugs on immune function, presenting evidence that schizophrenia is associated with an activation of the Th 2 arm of the immune response. Another chapter assessed the evidence for a role of Borna Disease Virus as a causal factor in schizophrenia and depression. The section on depressive illness contains chapters devoted to alterations in monocyte and lymphocyte numbers in depression, the effect of sleep deprivation on cytokine expression in depression, and immunological responses to dexamethasone in depressed patients.
Chapters concerning immunological changes in Alzheimer's disease assess the role of peripheral immunological activation and enhanced tryptophan degradation as a causal factor in neurodegenerative disease. In contrast, another chapter reports signs of peripheral immunosuppression in Alzheimer's patients compared with control subjects. The final chapter in this section reports increases in circulating concentrations of the Fas receptor (a type of cell death receptor) in Alzheimer's disease, and implicates a dysregulation of the Fas/Fas ligand system in apoptotic cell death in Alzheimer's disease.
Other chapters are devoted to topics such as sleep and adaptive immunity, immune changes in animal models of depression, the role of adrenergic and cholinergic receptors in immunomodulation and the role of leptin in psychotropic drug-induced weight gain.
Overall this book presents many new experimental findings in the area of psychoneuroimmunology, and will be useful to clinicians and scientists with an interest in the complex effects of psychiatric disease on the immune system.