Wednesday, March 12
5:00 - 6:00 pm
Awards Presentation and Data Blitz
6:00 - 6:30 pm
"Personalized Medicine"
Evian Gordon, PhD
Personalized Medicine has been driven by the FDA to find the best Markers of treatment prediction. A standardized integrative platform for finding Gene-Brain-Cognition Markers in brain-related disorders will be presented. Exemplars of Gene-Brain-Cognition Markers will be shown in Depression, Sleep disorders, ADHD and Schizophrenia. The immediate and longer term challenges for implementing Personalized Medicine in mainstream clinical practice, will be addressed.
Thursday, March 13
8:15 - 9:00 am
President's Award Lecture
Leanne (Lea) Williams, PhD
An integrative framework for emotional brain organization: the continuum of wellness and illness
In psychosomatic medicine research emotion has an important role in disease. ‘Integrative neuroscience’ (1) provides a framework for understanding emotional significance as a key element of human brain organization. In essence, the most fundamental principle determining significance is the axis of avoiding threat-attaining pleasure (2,3). Highest priority will be given to innate signals of potential threat, that have high contrast and unexpectedness. Signals of safety and potential pleasure have high symmetry and familiarity. At rapid time scales, emotional significance may be determined automatically and without conscious awareness via direct, excitatory networks. Over longer time scales, conscious controlled processing of detail, context and more abstract meaning occurs, with inhibitory feedback from higher-order cortical systems and autonomic arousal.
This model has been applied to understanding individual variations in emotional stability, and the role of emotional brain instabilities in conditions such as anxiety, depression, psychosis, attention, eating and conversion disorders. The research program has been supported by a global network of scientists using a standardized methodology (including behavioral, electrical brain-body function, structural and functional MRI and genetic measures) and large international database. The emotional brain organization model of wellness and illness, and implications of the research for psychosomatic medicine, are presented.
1. Gordon, E (Ed) (2000) Integrative Neuroscience: bringing together biological, psychological and clinical models of the human brain. Harwood Academic.
2. Williams LM (2006). An integrative model of ‘significance’ processing. J Integrative Neuroscience, 4, 1-47.
3. Williams LM & Gordon E (2007). Williams, L. M., & Gordon, E. (2007). Dynamic Organization of the Emotional Brain: Responsivity, Stability and Instability. Neuroscientist, 13, 4, 349-370
8:15 - 9:00 am
Herbert Weiner Early Career Award Lecture
Peter J. Gianaros
Brain-body pathways to cardiovascular disease risk
An individual's tendency to show exaggerated or otherwise dysregulated cardiovascular reactions to acute stressors has long been associated with increased risk for clinical and preclinical endpoints of cardiovascular disease. However, the neurobehavioral pathways that link stressor-evoked cardiovascular reactions to disease risk remain poorly defined. This presentation will review a line of neuroimaging research indicating that individual differences in one form of cardiovascular reactivity—blood pressure reactivity—vary with the functional and structural characteristics of a network of brain areas that are involved in processing stressors and regulating the cardiovascular system. Preliminary evidence will also be reviewed indicating that individual differences in the functional activity of two corticolimbic areas—the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex—are associated with preclinical atherosclerosis in the carotid arteries. Contextually, this research will be offered as one example of how imaging neuroscience methods can help define the ‘brain-body’ pathways that link stressful experiences and health.
10:00 - 11:30 am
"Of Mice and Men: translational research linking animal models with human psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) - implications for health and disease"
Stress-related modulation of the immune system continues to be a prominent biological pathway examined in psychosomatic research. Employing both sophisticated animal models and diverse healthy and clinical human populations, PNI investigators are conducting cutting-edge research focused on complex and integrated brain-immune connections that may be critical to our understanding of psychiatric conditions (e.g. depression), disruption in health behaviors (e.g. sleep), susceptibility to infection, and, more broadly, the stress response. However, the link between the animal and human research and the findings that are complimentary to each other are often overlooked. To this end, we propose symposia integrating both animal and human findings and highlighting two prominent and overlapping research areas in PNI emphasizing the bi-directional communication between the brain (central) and the immune system (peripheral): 1) the PNI of sickness behavior- and 2) acute vs. chronic stress on immune function. At the conclusion of the symposia, it is anticipated that audience members will: 1) appreciate the complex interactions between the immune system and both brain and behavior 2) recognize the significant contribution animal models make to our understanding of human PNI and 3) appreciate how translational PNI research aids in our understanding in how psychosocial factors impact disease.
Friday, March 14
8:00 - 8:50 am
President's Address
William Lovallo, PhD
9:00 - 9:45 am
Barchas Award Lecture
Christopher Coe, PhD
The Social Context of Immune Competence
While the immune system usually functions in autonomous manner, we have come to appreciate that immune responses can be significantly altered by external challenges and disturbances of the internal milieu, including by most events that stimulate hormone release. Thus, it is not surprising that psychological and social factors can also impinge on immunity when sufficiently salient. This presentation will review a program of research demonstrating many psychological influences on immune responses and describe a number of the important mediating pathways. In addition, we will argue that these types of psychobiological relationships may be most important at two points in the life span: during infant development when immune responses are maturing and subsequently during the process of immune senescence associated with old age. At both points early and late in the life, the typically transient alterations in immune competence may be more extended and have more clinical ramifications.
Saturday, March 15
0:00 - 10:45 am
Shapiro Award Lecture
Thomas Pickering, DPhil
The harm that doctors do: Hypertension as a psychosomatic disease.
The measurement of blood pressure (BP) by a physician is generally thought of as a harmless procedure, but Alvin Shapiro was one of the first to show that this is not necessarily so. Using data obtained by out-of-office BP monitoring, it will be argued that traditional BP measurement may misclassify the BP status of as many as 36 million Americans, which includes 12 million with white coat hypertension (high clinic BP and normal daytime BP) for whom the prognosis is relatively benign and drug treatment may be inappropriate, and 24 million with masked hypertension (normal clinic BP and high daytime BP), for whom drug treatment is not prescribed, but is presumably beneficial because of an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The increased BP in the medical setting may be a conditioned response rather than a manifestation of generalized anxiety, and may be the result of labeling the patient as hypertensive. Masked hypertension, where clinic BP is lower than daytime BP, may thus represent the “true” natural history of hypertension in the absence of exposure to adverse medical settings.
1:45 – 3:15
Invited Minority Initiative Symposium
“New Research in Health Disparities”
This symposium features three speakers that offer innovative approaches to the examination of health disparities. Dr. Camara Jules Harrell of Howard University discusses his groundbreaking research on individual and cultural racism using psychophysiological methods. For example, he finds that reports of racism are inversely related to overall perceptions of health. In addition, he shows that embracing mainstream cultural values was associated with both increased hostility and increased systolic blood pressure. Drs. Hector F. Myers of UCLA and Linda C. Gallo of SDSU present an integrative conceptual model of ethnicity-related stresses. This model highlights the unique role that ethnicity-related and SES-related processes are likely to play in the persistent ethnic health disparities. Dr. Michele K. Evans of the National Institute on Aging will discuss the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity across the Lifespan study (HANDLS). This urban study of health, race, and socioeconomic status uses mobile research laboratories to go into the neighborhoods to collect biomedical, psychosocial, cognitive, and environmental data. Moreover this longitudinal study will follow the participants and thus will provide sorely needed prospective data on the emergence of health disparities. Dr. Julian F. Thayer of the Ohio State University will serve as chair and discussant. Taken together these speakers represent the cutting edge of research on health disparities. Attendees will learn much about this important topic and its relevance to psychosomatic medicine.
|
