Patterns of Salivary Flow in Depressive Illness and During Treatment

The search for objective indices in diagnosis and prognosis of patients suffering from mental illness remains a matter of great clinical interest. While advances in this field have been reported from time to time, no method has become unequivocally established, and in affective disorders much interest has focused on the possible link between mood and physiological change. Cannon's work on the “Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage” (1920) indicated the breadth of this relationship and gave impetus to attempts at rating emotional responses by the severity of their accompanying autonomic changes. Papez (1937) also emphasized that “emotion is such an important function that its mechanism, whatever it be, should be placed on a structural basis”. While this is being sought currently in the limbic system, reticular formation and hypothalamus, the importance of the autonomic system as effector pathway of physiological responses accompanying emotional states has in no way diminished.