The question reflects the hypothesis that beside psychological factors biological patterns also have a significant effect on patients response to psychotherapeutic interventions (e.g. increased stress vulnerability may change effectivness of psychological interventions). The biological markers should be suitable as predictor parameters for prognosis of therapeutic outcome success and also for represeting psychotherapeutic effects on a biological level.

In addition we assume that epigentic effects can already be achieved by inpatient psychotherapy within a duration of 4-6 weeks. We are looking for suitable biological test designs to prove this hypothesis.