Background: The current US official position, since DSM-III, is that panic attacks represent the hallmark of panic disorder and play a major role in the development of the agoraphobic syndrome. The more favoured view in the European tradition is that neurotic personality and/or prodromal features such as mild depression and excessive worries precede the illness.
Method: We studied 126 consecutive cases of panic disorder with or without agoraphobia by DSM-III-R criteria, evaluated by relevant structured and semi-structured interviews.
Results: We provide evidence that characterological and prodromal antecedents represent a putative phobic-anxious temperamental substrate occurring in at least 30% of our sample. This temperament consists of three or more of the following traits: (1) increased sympathetic activity with repeated sporadic and isolated autonomic manifestations; (2) marked fear of illness; (3) hypersensitivity to separation; (4) difficulty to leave familiar surroundings; (5) marked need for reassurance; (6) oversensitivity to drugs and substances. Our data further suggest that these attributes are of familial origin, as a result of which the illness tends to declare itself earlier.
Limitation: The present investigation is largely correlational without a prospective component; however, the key validating familial data were obtained blindly.
Conclusion: Our data support a pathogenetic model whereby genetic diathesis unfolds from subclinical to clinical manifestations along temperamental, panic, phobic and avoidant patterns. We submit that the delineation of the phobic-anxious temperament will be useful in more completely charting the life course of the panic-agoraphobic spectrum; avoidant and dependent (Axis II) patterns appear more distal in the pathogenetic chain and, in many cases, can be conceptualized to be epiphenomenal to the disease process.