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Panic Disorder |
Overcoming Anxiety (Home) > Panic Disorder > Stressful Life Events Stressful Life EventsUncontrolled clinical descriptions have reported that the first panic attack is often preceded by some stressful life event . Controlled studies generally confirm the excess of life stress prior to the onset of PD . It was found that panic patients experience more life events in the year before the onset of the illness than do healthy control subjects and that the highest concentration of life stress occurs in the last few months before the initial symptoms . However, they did not confirm the findings by Finlay-Jones and Brown who reported that danger events were significantly over-represented among patients with ‘‘anxiety’’, whereas loss events were more frequent among patients with ‘‘depression’’. This information leads us to attribute a role as precipitating factors for the onset of PD to life events, but in a rather aspecific way. The degree of association between stressful events and PD, however, is not in any case very great: the Population Attributable Risk varies in fact between 30–39% . Most PD patients described how their first panic attacks occurred after rather than during a period of their lives they considered particularly stressful, which, however, they managed to cope with quite adequately Boulenger and Bisserbe. Apart from the obvious role of psychogenetic mechanisms in the occurrence of these symptoms, another possible interpretation is in terms of biological exhaustion or sensitisation or even in terms of an interruption of cognitive scheme.
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