Lecture ‘Clinical neuroscience and the heart-brain axis’

Beschrijving

As a researcher, it is becoming more important to look beyond the borders of your area of expertise. Interdisciplinary collaboration can provide new insights to pressing research questions.

With this in mind, the Scientific Research Committee and the departments of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences organise 'Interdisciplinary Medical & Health Seminars' together.

This annual seminar series consists of 10 thematic lectures with attention to complementarity between different research areas and their applications. Both state-of-the-art fundamental (bio)medical research as well as translational and clinical research are discussed.

To ensure that the lectures are representative for the diversity of research within the faculty, each department chooses one international top speaker.

Programma

Cognitive and emotional processes are shaped by the dynamic integration of brain and body. A major channel of interoceptive information comes from the heart, where phasic signals are conveyed to the brain to indicate how fast and strong the heart is beating.

This talk will detail how cardiac afferent signals can interact with neuronal mechanisms to alter emotion processing. This interoceptive channel is disrupted in distinct ways in autism, functional neurological disorder, and anxiety; specific interoceptive disturbances may contribute to our understanding of symptoms in these clinical conditions. The discrete cardiac effects on emotion and cognition have broad relevance to clinical neuroscience, with implications for peripheral treatment targets and behavioural interventions focused on the heart.

• Guest speaker: Prof. Sarah Garfinkel
• Organiser: Department of Head and Skin
• Host: Prof. Robrecht Raedt