Partial seizures can be misdiagnosed as panic attacks. There is considerable overlap of symptoms between temporal lobe seizures and panic attacks making the diagnosis extremely challenging. Temporal lobe seizures can present with intense fear and autonomic symptoms which are also seen in panic disorders. This results in delay in diagnosis and management. We report an interesting case of a young...

R ecently, there is a considerable progress in understanding the neurobiology of panic disorder. An interesting phenomenon is panic attacks preceded by states of diminished arousal. Mellman and Uhde (1) suggested that there was a relationship between this phenomenon and sleep-related panic. Mellman and Uhde (2) observed that sleep panic attacks typically arose during the transition towards earl...

BACKGROUND Previous research has suggested the clinical profile of individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) differs according to the presence or absence of comorbid migraine. We aimed to determine the clinical characteristics that differentiate individuals with BD with and without comorbid migraine in a large, representative, clinically well-characterised UK sample. METHODS The lifetime clinica...

BACKGROUND Panic attacks may be a risk marker for a variety of psychological problems and are associated with increased impairment in a host of domains. However, previous studies have not investigated the role of physical illness in the panic attack-disability relations, which is striking due to findings that physical illness is linked to both panic attacks and disability. The present investiga...

The purpose of the study was to contrast first panic attacks (PAs) of patients with panic disorder (PD) with vs. without agoraphobia and to explore differences between first PAs leading to the development of PD and those that remain isolated. Data were drawn from a community survey (N=2259 including 88 isolated PAs and 75 PD cases). An additional sample of 234 PD patients was recruited in a cli...

This systematic review aimed to examine the results of studies that have investigated the induction of panic attacks and/or the anxiogenic effect of the caffeine challenge test in patients with panic disorder. The literature search was performed in PubMed, Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde and the ISI Web of Knowledge. The words used for the search were caffeine, caffeine challenge test, panic disord...

Panic, when viewed ethologically, is not pathological in itself, it is rather an adaptation that evolved to facilitate escape in dangerous situations. Patients with panic disorder have panic with normal form, but the attacks occur in the absence of real danger. The agoraphobia syndrome can be understood as a related adaptation that is expected after repeated panic attacks. These hypotheses acco...

The Food and Drug Administration indication of alprazolam for the treatment of panic disorder tacitly suggests that it does not induce panic attacks. This suggestion is amplified by the history of alprazolam as the first medication approved for panic disorder. Moreover, alprazolam acutely decreases anxiety symptoms, including panic, and is widely used for this indication. Although dependence, w...