Psychosocial Stress and Cardiovascular Disease in Women Concepts, Findings, Future Perspectives

Kristina Orth-Gomér MD, PhD, is professor and director of the Unit for Social Factors and Health at the Karolinska Institutet. She holds a clinical appointment at the Seraphimer Hospital, Karolinska Institutet. From 1991, with cardiology colleagues, she has conducted the Stockholm Studies on Psychosocial Risk factors in Women, the first comprehensive, longitudinal study on women, stress and cardiovascular disease. Viola Vaccarino, MD is professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Emory University School of Medicine. Neil Schneiderman, PhD is the James L. Knight Professor of Psychology, Medicine, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Miami. He has been the principal investigator of multiple NIH programs sponsored by the NHLBI including the Miami Field Center of the Hispanic Community Health Study, the Miami Clinical Center of the enhancing Recovery in Coronary Heart Disease (ENRICHD) randomized clinical trial, and a 35 year duration institutional research training grant on biobehavioral bases of cardiovascular disease. Hans-Christian Deter, MD is a professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at Humboldt University in Berlin. His research focuses on development of new psychosomatic outpatient treatment procedures for physically ill patients; course control studies on therapeutic outcome after outpatient and inpatient psychosomatic treatment; and physiologic studies on the differentiation of treatment results in asthma and coronary heart disease patients.