Anxiety Disorder Clinical and Research Unit, Vita-Salute S.Raffaele University, Milan, Italy.
Psychiatry Res. 2010 Apr 30;176(2-3):254-6. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2009.04.020. Epub 2010 Jan 29.
The amygdala and the limbic system are important in inducing a fear reaction; if this "fear network" is involved in panic disorder, panic patients might be more sensitive to fear stimuli than healthy subjects. We compared the startle response with an aversive stimulus in a sample of 29 patients with panic disorder and a sample of 29 healthy controls. The intensity of the startle response, induced by a series of aversive loud (100 dB) sounds, was measured by skin conductance recording in each subject. No statistically significant differences between the two groups were found in either the baseline level of skin conductance or in the response to the stimuli. Nonetheless, panic patients reported significantly higher levels of baseline anxiety measured by the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. In conclusion, our data do not support the hypothesis that patients with panic disorder are characterised by a hyperreactivity, as measured by the skin conductance response, to fearful sudden stimuli or, at least, to those delivered to the auditory system.
杏仁核和边缘系统在引起恐惧反应中很重要；如果这个“恐惧网络”与惊恐障碍有关，那么惊恐障碍患者可能对恐惧刺激比健康受试者更敏感。我们比较了 29 名惊恐障碍患者和 29 名健康对照组的惊吓反应和厌恶刺激。通过每位受试者的皮肤电导率记录测量了一系列令人厌恶的响亮（100 分贝）声音引起的惊吓反应的强度。在皮肤电导率的基线水平或对刺激的反应方面，两组之间没有统计学上的显著差异。尽管如此，惊恐障碍患者在状态-特质焦虑量表中报告的基线焦虑水平明显更高。总之，我们的数据不支持这样的假设，即惊恐障碍患者的特征是对恐惧的突然刺激（至少是听觉系统接收到的刺激）表现出超反应性，如皮肤电导率反应所测量的那样。
