George P. Chrousos is professor and chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the Athens University Medical School, and Distinguished Visiting Scientist, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), NIH, Bethesda, Maryland. He was for many years Section Chief, and later Branch Chief of the Pediatric and Reproductive Endocrinology Branch, NICHD, NIH.
Dr. Chrousos, an endocrinologist and researcher, is devoted to the integrative approach and thinking in medicine, and has performed seminal work in the stress research field mostly related to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a major branch of the stress system. His work has led to improved understanding of the physiology and pathophysiology of the stress response at the neuroendocrine, cellular and molecular levels.
He described the syndrome of glucocorticoid resistance that carries his name (Chrousos syndrome) as a disease of the glucocorticoid receptor and subsequently reported the majority of the kindred with this disorder in the world. He is recognized worldwide for his highly original work on the glucocorticoid signaling system, diseases of the HPA axis, such as Cushing’s syndrome, Addison’s disease, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, the physiology of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), the development of new CRH receptor antagonists, the hypersecretion of CRH in melancholic depression, anorexia nervosa and other stress-related disorders, and for elucidating the differential diagnosis of depression-related Pseudocushing and Cushing Syndrome.
Chrousos has contributed immensely to the biomedical literature and his work has provided new insights into a spectrum of clinical conditions and disorders that transcend the limits of classical endocrinology, such as reproduction and pregnancy, inflammation, stress-immune interactions, surgical stress, sleep, and septic shock, as well as chronic complex disorders such as depression, eating disorders, asthma, metabolic syndrome and autoimmune-inflammatory diseases.
Dr. Chrousos’s work has withstood the test of time and has a broad interdisciplinary following. According to the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI, highly cited), Dr. Chrousos is among the most cited clinical and basic investigators in the world (Clinical Medicine and Biology & Biochemistry fields) and the highest cited clinical Endocrinologist and Pediatrician; his work has been cited over 50,000 times.
Dr. Chrousos has a record of over 16 full publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, with his highly cited review on ‘The Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis and Immune-Mediated Inflammation’. In 1997, Dr. Chrousos received the Hans Selye Award from the Hans Selye Foundation for outstanding contributions to stress research, and was recently elected as a Member, Institute of Medicine, The National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. and the Academia Europea, London, UK.
In the last 30 years, Dr. Chrousos has been at the forefront of stress research, and his work has been a valuable tool for promoting the significance and clinical implications of this interdisciplinary research field. In the review shown below he provides a contemporary integrative view about the stress concept and the role of stress in common human diseases.
