The clinical spectrum of panic attacks

Abstract

Current psychiatric nosologies associate recurrent panic attacks mainly with panic disorder, and agoraphobia with panic attacks, circumscribing their clinical relevance to the anxiety group of diagnosis. Through selected clinical presentations and a literature review the authors propose the existence of a cross-syndromal panic-anxiety represented by the recurrent panic attack that crosses the borders of any single group of diagnosis. This concept is of relevance for clinical psychiatry and may also constitute an important source of variance in psychiatric research.