News flash Stress causes panic

If you have panic disorder, you may have noticed that your symptoms get worse when you're stressed. Apparently, when you're under stress, symptoms are more likely to get increase gradually over time rather than immediately and all at once.

In other words, if you break up with your boyfriend or lose your job, and you have panic disorder, you might make it through a stressful event without panicking, but panic can still result as much as three months or more later. At least, that's according to a recent Brown U. study. From the link:

Just like everyone else, people with panic disorder have real stress in their lives. They get laid off and they fight with their spouses. How such stresses affect their panic symptoms hasn’t been well understood, but a new study by researchers at Brown University presents the counterintuitive finding that certain kinds of stressful life events cause panic symptoms to increase gradually over succeeding months, rather than to spike immediately. 

“We definitely expected the symptoms to get worse over time, but we also thought the symptoms would get worse right away,” said Ethan Moitra, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

But even if the events don’t seem to trigger an immediate panic attack, said Dr. Martin Keller, professor of psychiatry and human behavior and principal investigator of the research, patients, family members, or their psychiatrists need to keep their guard up.

Interestingly:

A statistical analysis of the results found that for stressful life events in the categories of “work,” such as a demotion or layoff, or “friends/family/household,” such as a family argument, panic symptoms that had meandering severity before the event, increased steadily but gradually for at least 12 weeks afterward.

Stressful events in seven other categories, such as “crime/legal” or “deaths” did not seem to affect panic symptoms at all.

 (Via.)