New review in Archives on autonomic nervous system

http://m.adc.bmj.com/content/early/2014/02/26/archdischild-2012-301863.full

This (paywalled) article on the archives website, by Corinne Rees, raises interesting questions about the role of autonomic dysfunction in functional disorders, in mediating anxiety, and in sustaining the link between early adverse experience and later psychopathology.
The problem is the authors obvious emotional investment in the importance of the ANS. It reads like an opinion piece, not a careful review of the evidence. There’s passionate advocacy of the ANS’s importance, but little discussion of the fact that it’s dysfunction could have other causes itself, be they physical or psychological. Indeed, the fact that the ANS is so difficult to define is not mentioned. Finally, although patient and parent reports are of course important, to reproduce these reports uncritically in a  review article, without research corroboration, may raise a few eyebrows.
Nonetheless, this is an essential read, whether you 100% agree or not.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.