The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis controls reactions to stress and regulates various body processes such as digestion, the immune system, mood and sexuality, and energy usage.
This volume focuses on the role it plays in the immune system and provides substantive experimental and clinical data to support current understanding in the field, and potential applications of this knowledge in the treatment of disease.
* Evidence presented in this book suggests that the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems form the Neuroendoimmune Supersystem, which integrates all the biological functions of higher organisms both in health and disease for their entire life cycle.
* Contributors include both the scientists who initiated the work on the HPA axis and on the autonomic nervous system, and those who joined the field later.

Neuroimmunology is one of the most rapidly developing branches of Neurobiology, prompted by novel neurochemical, neuroendocrinological and neurophysiological investigations of the central and peripheral nervous system including neuro-endocrine systems. Neuroimmunology can be considered an interdisciplinary science that covers relevant aspects of how the peripheral immune system can influence brain physiology and elicit neuro-endocrine immuno-regulatory responses and also how local interactions between immune and neuronal mediators of the brain influence the occurrence and course of neuropathologic diseases. That explains the reason why we have in this volume chapters that focus on immune-neuro-endocrine interactions underlying the control and regulation of processes involved in both immune and brain physiology and in the pathogenesis of different nervous diseases. Among such diseases are: schizophrenia, HIV, associated dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, several experimental pathologies, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune encephalomyelitis, Theilers virus infection, nervous system demyelination diseases, the primary degenerative disorders such as Alzheimera (TM)s and Parkinsona (TM)s as well as brain injuries resulting from stroke and trauma, the neuroimmunology of gene therapy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, prion disease and all theoretical questions covering these pathologies. All of the above mentioned involve autoimmune processes.

It is difficult, indeed, to imagine fundamental neurobiological processes, autoimmune, neuroendocrine and infectious diseases, where immune factors are not of prime importance. The elucidation of the intimate molecular-biological problems ofimmunopathologies requires deep knowledge of the intricate connection between immunomodulators, immune competent cells of blood, brain, and other organs.

This volume contains data on multiple immunomodulators, many of which are also the products of hypothalamic brain cell neurosecretion. Interleukins (IL-1a, IL-1A, IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, TNFa), immunophylin and ubiquitin as well as proline rich peptides, comprised of 10-15 amino acids are being produced in N. Supraopticus and N. Paraventricularis and then secreted into neurohypophysis. Along the neurosecretion of the mentioned cytokines, there are other immunomodulators, the primary structure of which had been completely deciphered such as: Immunophyllins, intracellular receptors of immunosuppressors FK506, cyclosporine A., rapamicin. They are peptidyl-prolyl-cis-trans-isomerases. There are novel immunological hypothalamic factors such as ubiquitin, macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF), as well as Thymosin A 4(1-39). This data allowed us to propose the concept of neuroendocrine immune system of the brain.