Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Stress worsens or increases the risk of variety of medical conditions: not only mental disorders but also physical disorders like heart disease, asthma, gastrointestinal disorders, obesity and so on. What are the biological mechanisms whereby stress is translated into a physical disease process? How can physical disease result in altered emotion, cognition, or behavior? Goal of my research is to reveal the biological mechanisms whereby psychological, behavioral, and social factors influence, in particular, physical disease outcomes, and to adopt this information for optimizing medical care.

One of current projects is to investigate common mechanism in central processing of interoception (signal from internal body state) across several stress-related syndromes by international collaboration study. Studies suggest that stress-related pain disorders shared considerable overlap in the pathophysiology; disorders of central pain processing. Central pain processing in the patients with irritable bowel syndrome, those with fibromyalgia, those with functional dyspepsia, and those with inflammatory bowel diseases is examined with exactly same protocol using multimodal brain imaging and compared directly or in association with psycho-social factors and physiological reactions across these diseases in Japanese, Belgian and French faculties.

Interdisciplinary approach will help to reveal pathophysiology of the stress-related disorders with bio-psyche-social background and provide useful information in developing its treatments.