The new field of Brain–Body Medicine: What have we learned and where are we headed?

To our knowledge, this is the first time that neuroimaging findings from a variety of different areas of Brain–Body Medicine have been published together. Certainly there have been a number of such findings presented in a variety of journals in recent years. For example, there is a growing brain imaging literature on pain (Davis et al., 1997; Coghill et al., 1999), placebo effects in pain (Petrovic et al., 2002; Wager et al., 2004) (and in other medical settings, Benedetti 2008), autonomic regulation (Critchley et al., 2000; Milad et al., 2007), neuro-cardiology (Critchley et al., 2005), brain–gut disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome (Mertz et al., 2000), and other functional somatic syndromes such as fibromyalgia (Gracely et al., 2002). There have also been a few neuroimaging papers on asthma (Rosenkranz et al., 2005), bladder function (Fowler et al., 2008), conversion disorder (Marshall et al., 1997), immune function (Ohira et al., 2008), and endocrine regulation (Kirsch et al., 2005). However, these papers have as a rule been pioneering efforts in uncharted territory, published in isolation. Part of what is unique about the Special Issue is that papers on all of these (as well as other) topics have been published together in a single volume, along with integrative commentaries, reviews and methods papers. Perhaps more importantly, what this juxtaposition reveals is that there is a remarkable commonality of brain areas and brain mechanisms that appear again and again in these papers. This commonality, which exceeded our expectations, suggests that there is a coherent field of neurobiology that relates emotion, emotion regulation and stress on the one hand to systemic medical disorders and peripheral physiological processes on the other. This commonality was presaged by early theorists such as Walter Cannon (1932) and William James (1890), who helped to establish an “integrative physiology” perspective on studying both emotion and disease. The array of approaches and methods now available, however, allows the mechanisms of integrative physiology to be explored in the living human brain with a specificity that these early writers could not have foreseen. As noted in the editorial that introduced this Special Issue (Lane and Wager, 2009), the field of Brain–Body Medicine has emerged from a foundation of empirical research that in recent decades has unequivocally demonstrated that negative emotional states such as depression and stress have deleterious effects on physical health (Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser, 2005; McEwen 1998; Scheier and Carver, 1992; Lesperance et al., 2002; Lane 2008). Moreover, researchers are beginning to identify the peripheral mediators of these relationships. In this issue, we have seen how concepts related to negative