Five protocols conducted out of the Consultation-Liaison Service-based behavioral medicine research program examine the phenomenology and biological correlates of illness or treatment-induced mood, behavioral, and cognitive changes. The protocols address such areas as: a) the psychiatric phenomenology of certain diseases and their treatment; b) the treatment response characteristics of psychiatric disorders associated with medical diseases or their treatment; c) biochemical factors that may serve as predictive diagnostic markers for illness or for treatment- associated mood/behavioral or cognitive syndromes; d) the effects of mood state alterations on immunologic function. Significant findings to date include demonstration of the following: 1) higher magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) determined mean brain ionized magnesium in 15 depressed patients compared with 46 controls and 22 alcoholics; 2) lower ionized and total serum magnesium in alcoholics compared with controls; 3) substantial variability in magnesium concentrations across tissues, with brain ionized magnesium showing the lowest concentration (200 micromol) of any tissue sampled; 4) absence of clear benefit associated with synthroid or cytomel in ten patients participating in a placebo- controlled, double-blind crossover trial of T3 and T4 in depression; 5) preliminary evidence of a disproportionately high past history of physical and sexual abuse and past history of affective disorder in patients with psychogenic versus neurogenic dysphonia; 6) demonstration of pimozide-induced depression in normal volunteers with stuttering disorder.
