Psychophysiologic Testing of Cardiovascular Responses to Physiologic and Psychological Challenge: Analysis of Intraindividual Stability

Abstract

Clinical, experimental, and epidemiologic evidence provides many supporting arguments for the assumption that reactions to various types of functional load may participate in the pathogenesis of some chronic disease states. This may occur in a variety of ways: such reactions may function as precipitating agents in states of acute failure, through a mechanism whereby misregulations become fixed, or as a source of cumulative organic microinjuries. When these processes are in play, the originally adaptive reaction may become a part of the pathologic process, which, in turn, may modify reactions to stress, thus closing the vicious circle. If this conception is valid, consistent qualitative or quantitative peculiarities in the nature of these reactions represent one of the sources of individually differing risk for disease.