Because respiratory complications arising from common anxiety medications may contraindicate pharmacological intervention in patients with asthma, behavioral intervention is a vital component of treating anxiety successfully in these patients. Previous research suggests behavioral treatment may reduce panic symptoms and asthma medication use while subsequently increasing quality of life in pati...

Side-effects arising on the grounds of antidepressant administration pose as a substantial obstacle hindering successful depressive disorder treatment. Side-effects, especially those severe or those manifested through dramatic clinical presentations such as panic attacks, make the treatment far more difficult and shake patients' trust in both the treatment and the treating physician. This case ...

OBJECTIVE Little is known about factors associated with smoking cessation in cancer patients. This study examined the impact of panic attacks on smoking abstinence likelihood among cancer patients receiving tobacco cessation treatment. METHOD The relationship of panic attacks to 7-day point-prevalence abstinence at mid-treatment, end of treatment, and 6-month post-end of treatment were examin...

This study examined whether cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) could prevent the development or worsening of panic-spectrum psychopathology and anxiety symptoms in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). 41 patients with COPD, who had undergone pulmonary rehabilitation, were randomised to either a four-session CBT intervention condition (n = 21) or a routine care condition (n = 20). Asse...

In this paper, we investigated ambulatory sleep heart period variability in panic disorder participants with nocturnal panic (NP) compared to daytime panic attacks only. A time-derived measure of heart period variability (HPV) during sleep was significantly reduced in the NP group (n=32) relative to the daytime panic (n=17) and nonanxious (n=17) control groups. Consistent with previous work, NP...

Panic disorder (PD) is associated with significant social and health consequences. The present study examined the impact of treatment on PD patients' quality of life. Patients (N = 156) meeting DSM-III-R (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [3rd ed., rev.]; American Psychiatric Association, 1987) criteria for PD with agoraphobia were randomly assigned to group cognitive-behavi...

BACKGROUND Decision-making is a complex process, which can be assessed experimentally by the two-choice prediction task. Error-rate, i.e. the frequency of incorrect predictions during this task, is an important factor for the response selection during decision-making. This investigation examined whether the frequency of incorrect predictions has an augmented effect on the number of different st...

Our aim was to determine whether panic disorder (PD) patients, major depressive patients without panic attacks (MD) and major depressive patients with panic attacks (MDP) respond similarly to hyperventilation challenge tests. We randomly selected 35 PD patients, 33 MDP patients, 27 MD patients and 30 normal volunteers with no family history of anxiety or mood disorder. The patients had not been...

There is a gap between proposed theoretical attachment theory frameworks, measures of attachment in the assessment phase and their relationship with changes in outcome after a psychodynamic oriented psychotherapy. Based on a clinical case study of a young woman with Panic Attack Disorder, this paper examined psychotherapy outcome findings comparing initial and post-treatment assessments, accord...

Currently, panic disorder (PD) is considered a mental disorder based on the assumptions that panic attacks (PAs) are "false alarms" that arise from abnormally sensitive defense systems in the central nervous system and that PD is treated with therapies specifically acting on anxiety or fear mechanisms. This article aims to propose an alternative perspective based on the results of some experime...