[Spasmophilia or panic attack?].

For many years, the symptoms grouped under the label "spasmophilia" have been differently evaluated in France by psychiatrists, who ascribe them to hysteria or anxiety, and by endocrinologists and general practitioners for whom they are all due to neuromuscular hyperexcitability, the cause of which must be sought in the biochemistry of calcium. Recent studies on anxiety should reduce the gap between these discordant views. The concept of anxiety itself has changed owing to the discriminant effects of psychotropic drugs and to a classification based on precise diagnostic criteria without theoretical presuppositions. Since anxiety can be biochemically induced, the hypotheses put forward by "spasmophilologists", such as disorders of calcium metabolism or hyperventilation, can now be tested in the laboratory.