Stress Management, PNI, and Disease

As our understanding of the immunologic processes that underlie the vulnerability to certain infectious, neoplastic, and inflammatory diseases and other immunoregulatory conditions has grown so too has the empirical basis relating psychosocial processes and stress physiology to these same immunologic processes. This provides a rationale for first examining the influence of stress processes on disease risk and disease course, and second for the development of interventions to mitigate stress processes in persons at risk for, or managing a wide range of diseases where the immune system plays some role in health outcomes. This chapter will summarize the state of the field of research examining the effects of stress management-based interventions on psychoneuroimmunologic (PNI) processes and health outcomes using a few examples of diseases involving some type of immune system alteration.