New vistas in immunopsychopharmacology

The fifties of this century were a time of expansion of psychophysiology, psychopharmacology as well as immunology. But the immune system was considered by several years as completely autonomous, indetifying foreign elements to the host, and clearing them from the body. Selye was the first who put forward the hypothesis that the thymus takes part in stress phenomena and the pituitary-adrenal-endocrine system mediates the relations between stress and immune system. Then many reports on the immunological consequences of behavior were published. Herbert Novera Spector coined the term neuroimmunomodulation (NIM), and used it in the paper published in 1983. First International Workshop on NIM was held in 1985. Advances in research of the past decade brought psychoimmunopharmacology out of the folklore into the science. The perspectives of the development of understanding further details of NIM depend upon application of antisense nucleotides in further experiments, estimation of cytokine level in cerebro-spinal fluid, observations of central effects in patients treated by cytokines, measurements of several immunological, behavioral biochemical and neuroendocrine variables.