Agoraphobia: Definition, Treatment, Symptom, Causes and Cure

Although family studies could challenge categorical distinctions between agoraphobia and panic disorder, and between agoraphobia and other phobias, few data are currently available on this topic. The risk for agoraphobia was initially noted to be significantly higher among parents and siblings of 60 agoraphobic patients than estimates of the population incidence.

A second family study, including non-anxious controls and their relatives, confirmed this familial aggregation of agoraphobia, showing that the morbidity risk for agoraphobia was significantly increased among relatives of agoraphobics but not the relatives of PD patients nor non-anxious subjects.

Furthermore, with 144 patients with PD and/or agoraphobia according to DSM-III, agoraphobia was strictly clustered in families of agoraphobic patients. This familial aggregation of agoraphobia seems moderate, with a threefold increased risk for DSM-III-R PD with agoraphobia versus not ill controls ), but with a specific familial loading for other phobias.

In contrast to this, Kendler et al. found evidence of both partial distinctness and overlap with respect to the genetic contribution to the aetiology of agoraphobia, social and situational phobias. Similarly, in a second epidemiologically based twin study including panic agoraphobia and social phobia probands, no genetic contributions were specific to either phobia.

It is noteworthy that those two twin studies did not report separately single and comorbid cases of phobias, otherwise the two sets of findings should be consistent. For agoraphobia, heredity of liability was 39% in a female twin population, whereas the rest of the variance in liability was due to individual–specific environmental effects.

Probandwise concordance for agoraphobia was 23.2 among MZ and 15.3 among DZ twins, and tetrachoric correlation ranged from 0.41± 0.11 among MZ to 0.15± 0.13 among DZ twins.

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