Anxiety Disorder- Panic

Question 1

Anxiety panic - intro

Answer 1

Recurrent and unexpected panic attacks with intense fear and discomfort
Which include fear of dying, sweating and nausea ect
4 symptoms would need to be present for diagnosis
Panic attack in 1 month with persistent worry
A significant maladaptive change in behaviour change related

Question 2

Pharmacotherapy anxiety

Answer 2

Mitte (2005) study with SSRIs and panic disorder
Effect size of 0.41 which shows its an effective treatment acutely
However it’s important to look at relapse in the long term
Donovan et Al (2010) 13RCT
6 panic disorder RCT
found they do reduce relapse rate to a large effect size -3x less likely to relapse

Question 3

Anxiety model

Answer 3

Psychological model of panic
Wells (1997)
Anxiety provoked situation elicits bodily/ cognitive symptoms of anxiety
These symptoms are then misinterpreted as heart attack
Misinterpretation leads to more anxiety
Engage in avoidance/ safety behaviour
Escape situation- therefore never sees the reality

Question 4

Anxiety model support

Answer 4

Clark et Al (1997) claims symptoms are misinterpreted- panic
2 studies on completed self report on ambiguous studies = found panic patients wrote more catastrophic explanations
Compared to other MH disorders therefore study is panic disorder specific
Replicated in study 2
A more recent meta-analysis shown large effect size for catastrophic misinterpretation

Question 5

Psychological - anxiety

Answer 5

CBT typically working on exposure
Hoffman & smits (2008)
Serval MA suggest CBT is effective but RCTs aren’t very high qual studies panic= only marginally significant
However a recent study by Papola et Al (2023)
On a larger sample of 74 trials finding that face to face CBT has a significant effect over treatment as usual - higher qual studies show significant affect