Health Neuroscience: Defining a New Field

Abstract

Health neuroscience is a new field that is at the interface of health psychology and neuroscience. It is concerned with the interplay between the brain and physical health over the lifespan. This review provides a conceptual introduction to health neuroscience, focusing on its major themes, representative studies, methodologies, and future directions.

Figure 1

Health neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field at the interface of health psychology and neuroscience. Thematically, health neuroscience is concerned with understanding how the brain influences and is influenced by physical health across the lifespan—extending along a continuum shown at the bottom of the figure of optimal states of health and well being to states of disease risk, symptom expression, and clinical illness. Distal contextual influences at the top of the figure are viewed to impact physical health via downstream effects that are mediated by the brain, including social (e.g., familial and peer networks), cultural (e.g., valued group identities and shared practices), environmental (e.g., counties, neighborhoods, workplaces, etc.), interventional (e.g., efforts to change physical activity, diets, lifestyles, psychological states, etc.), and health policy (e.g., laws affecting the distribution of health resources, public health messaging and campaigns, etc.) influences. Proximal influences at the bottom of the figure are viewed to impact physical health via direct and interactive effects on the brain, as well as via mediating processes that affect and are affected by the brain, including genetic, epigenetic, developmental, and aging influences. Processes that bi-directionally and dynamically link the brain to states of health throughout life include factors that are widely studied in health psychology, but also studied historically in separate fields of study; namely, cognitive, stress, emotion, health behavioral, peripheral physiological, and gene expression processes. Health neuroscience studies are diverse and integrative, insofar as these processes are viewed as being regulated by the brain via top-down (efferent) pathways and as influencing the brain via bottom-up (afferent) pathways. In this way, health neuroscience studies conceptualize measurements of brain function and structure as outcome variables that are dependent on bottom-up pathways and as independent variables that determine health processes via top-down pathways.

Figure 2

In this figure, Erickson and colleagues (2011) demonstrated that a 1 year randomized exercise intervention resulted in an increase in the size of the hippocampus relative to the control group, but no significant changes in the size of the caudate nucleus or thalamus. This example illustrates how a health behavior intervention (i.e., exercise) affects brain structure in ways that predict cognitive functioning.