Health and Behavior: Frontiers of Research in the Biobehavioral Sciences

Health and Behavioris a report prepared by a task force under the supervision of a distinguished committee of the Institute of Medicine headed by David Hamburg. The committee drew on the advice of some 400 consultants in a series of meetings, the purpose of which was to delineate the health roles of the biobehavioral sciences. The editors have distilled the accumulated wisdom into a series of interesting and informative chapters. In this enterprise they proceeded logically from documenting the importance of life-style in the most significant diseases of our time ("As much as 50 percent of mortality from the ten leading causes of death in the United States can be traced to life style.") to reviewing the state of the art ("Coverage is broad but not exhaustive.") to describing "many promising research directions." They concluded with recommendations for health science policy. This book is likely to influence the direction