Their finding supports our position that panic/anxiety and predator stress/fear are two different phenomenological&biological animals. A true translational moment indeed.
Not sure if I am allowed to post the whole abstract, but the link is here.
| Program#/Poster#: | 68.14/V18 |
| Presentation Title: | Microglial acid-sensing t-cell death associated gene-8 (tdag8) receptor in co2 evoked behavior and physiology: Relevance to panic |
| Location: | Hall F-J |
| Presentation time: | Saturday, Oct 13, 2012, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM |
| Authors: | *L. E. LARKE1, J. RUSH1, K.-Y. LI2, I. LEWKOWICH3, R. W. PUTNAM2, R. SAH1; 1Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosci., Univ. Of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH; 2Wright State Univ., Dayton, OH; 3Cincinnati Children’s Hosp. Med. Ctr., Cincinnati, OH |
Our review is posted here. The abstract follows:
>>This review paper presents an amplification of the suffocation false alarm theory (SFA) of spontaneous panic (Klein, 1993). SFA postulates the existence of an evolved physiologic suffocation alarm system that monitors information about potential suffocation. Panic attacks maladaptively occur when the alarm is erroneously triggered. That panic is distinct from Cannon’s emergency fear response and Selye’s General Alarm Syndrome is shown by the prominence of intense air hunger during these attacks. Further, panic sufferers have chronic sighing abnormalities outside of the acute attack. Another basic physiologic distinction between fear and panic is the counter-intuitive lack of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activation in panic. Understanding panic as provoked by indicators of potential suffocation, such as fluctuations in pCO2 and brain lactate, as well as environmental circumstances fits the observed respiratory abnormalities. However, that sudden loss, bereavement and childhood separation anxiety are also antecedents of “spontaneous” panic requires an integrative explanation. Because of the opioid system’s central regulatory role in both disordered breathing and separation distress, we detail the role of opioidergic dysfunction in decreasing the suffocation alarm threshold. We present results from our laboratory where the naloxone-lactate challenge in normals produces supportive evidence for the endorphinergic defect hypothesis in the form of a distress episode of specific tidal volume hyperventilation paralleling challenge-produced and clinical panic.
Keywords
Affective neuroscience; Endogenous opioids; Panic disorder; Respiratory physiology; Separation Anxiety
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Ref: Preter M, Klein DF. Panic, Suffocation False Alarms, Separation Anxiety and Endogenous Opioids. Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 32/3 (2008) 603-612.
