Letters to the editor: The psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology and its importance in modern medicine (Carta al Editor: La psiconeuroinmunoendocrinología y su importancia en la medicina actual)

FRAGMENT: We are all well aware that emotions affect our body. This assertion supports the evidence -quite overwhelming at this stage- that patient improvement is often more rapid and health care is less expensive when the therapy also focuses on individual’s behaviour, thoughts and feelings. For this reason, it is important to understand clearly how body and mind can integrate. One of the basic aspects of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology(PNIE) includes using medical knowledge to approach such different conditions as mood disorders (e.g.:depression), neurological patterns (e.g.: dementia), immunological disorders (e.g.: autoimmune diseases) or neoplastic lesions.In present-day medicine, PNIE is of prime importance because it focuses on the patient as an individual set within a bio-psycho-socialcontext, and addresses medical issues from this perspective. In this sense, the focus would not lie on the symptom –cephalalgia, for example-but rather on the patient as an individual expressing such symptom within his/her own personal context.In the following paragraphs, I will briefl y describe PNIE’s most relevant aspects: The psyche, the nervous system, the endocrine system and the immune system had been considered to work autonomously for long time. It took many years to prove that these systems are functionally related to one another. Evidence of this interconnection is to be found in neurohormones, that is, substances produced by neurosecretory cells which are largely present in the animal kingdom.Neurohormones were fi rst found in the hypothalamus, the nervous system region where they are the most numerous and largely concentrated.Many hypothalamic hormones have been subsequently isolated to learn about their mechanisms of action and their role in the human body.Today we know that behaviour (for instance, sexual and eating patterns) and immunologic responses can be controlled through thehypothalamus. This shows that there is a specifi c region in our brain, the hypothalamus, where body-and-mind integration occurs. Inother words, the hypothalamus is remarkably important in PNIE, as can be observed in the case of so-called sickness behaviour, which ispresent in neoplastic, infectious or stress-induced patterns. -FRAGMENTO: Todos sabemos perfectamente bien que las emociones afectan el cuerpo. Esta postura pasaría por alto las pruebas, ahora abrumadoras, de que los pacientes a menudo mejoran más rápidamente y gastan menos en salud cuando el tratamiento de su enfermedad abarca su comportamiento, sus pensamientos y sus sentimientos. Por eso, es importante tener en