The prevention, diagnosis and treatment of stress-related disorders are major challenges across medical disciplines. Reasons include a missing covariance between the psychological and physiological stress response and a tremendous intra-individual complexity of disease-related factors, resulting in a broad inter-individual heterogeneity of pathogenetic mechanisms. This book introduces ‘Neuropattern’, a new concept that attempts to assess the activity of neuroendocrine interfaces participating in the communication between the brain and the body during stress. This approach allows close examination of the causal mechanisms behind stress-related disturbances and diseases, thus enabling individualized preventive and therapeutic interventions. This publication provides clinicians, researchers and students from the fields of psychiatry, psychology, neurobiology and psychoendocrinology with an excellent overview of how knowledge from basic psychobiological research can be translated for the benefit of their patients.

Series edited by: A. Riecher-Rössler, N. Sartorius