Six protocols are currently active and conducted out of the Consultation-Liaison Service-based behavioral medicine research program. These protocols examine the phenomenology and biological correlates of illness or treatment-induced mood, behavioral, and cognitive changes. The protocols address such areas as: a) the effects of previous psychiatric history on the psychiatric morbidity associated with certain diseases and their treatment; b) the psychiatric phenomenology of certain diseases and their treatment; c) the treatment response characteristics of psychiatric disorders associated with medical diseases or their treatment; d) biochemical factors that may serve as predictive diagnostic markers for illness or for treatment-associated mood/behavioral or cognitive syndromes; e) the effects of mood state alterations on immunologic function. Significant findings to date include demonstration of the following: 1) absence of effect of menstrual cycle phase on free magnesium as measured by magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) in normal women; 2) an absence of correlation between free magnesium as measured by MRS and intercellular magnesium measures; 3) preliminary evidence of increased frontal cerebral blood flow during anabolic steroid administration in normal controls.
