Autonomic Dysfunction in Psychoses
- 1 July 1962
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Medical Association (AMA) in Archives of General Psychiatry
- Vol. 7 (1) , 1-14
- https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1962.01720010003001
Abstract
Recently, Rubin13,14reported that the so-called functionally psychotic adult is incapable of manifesting an organized response to stress because of a fundamental impairment of function of either the adrenergic or cholinergic mechanism or both. The major hypotheses confirmed in the experiments were: (1) effective adjustments to emergency situations requiremaximalgeneralized sympathetic response; (2) to attain a maximal level of sympathetic activity in the intact organism, it is not only necessary that increased levels of adrenergic activity follow the emergency but that the level of cholinergic activity decrease; (3) the disordered responses to stress that characterize the functional psychoses represent significant departures from the adrenergic increase and cholinergic decrease that characterizes the effective, adjusting individual during stress; (4) the varieties of disordered response to stress represent discrete levels of activity of interacting adrenergic and cholinergic mechanism. That is, the disorder may representKeywords
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