Stress, Neuropeptides, and Systemic Disease

Abstract

Since the advent of modern psychopharmaceuticals in the 1950s, an increasing number of psychiatrists have become medical intranauts, exploring human inner space, discovering receptors, peptides, neuropeptides, neurotransmitters, and other chemical messengers that are found in the central and autonomic nervous systems and elsewhere. The editors and the other 46 contributors to this book are experts in this field. They have produced informative, authoritative, and up-to-date coverage of contemporary knowledge of the body's response to potent stressors as modulated by currently known neuropeptides. An opening nine-chapter section devoted to basic mechanisms provides succinct neuroanatomic, neurochemical, and neuropharmacologic data derived from studies of hypothalamic -responses to stress, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis regulation, the role of the amygdala in autonomic and neuroendocrine responses to stress, neuropeptides involved in stress, neuropeptidemediated regulation of the neuroendocrine and autonomic responses to stress, corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and autonomic-cardiovascular responses to stress, and CRF stress and animal behavior. The final chapter of this section is an excellent review of the highly sensitive techniques that have been developed to