Prevalence of mitral valve prolapse in panic disorder: effect of echocardiographic criteria.

Although several investigators have found a higher incidence of mitral valve prolapse (MVP) in patients with panic disorder (PD) and agoraphobia with panic attacks (AgP), there are now several conflicting reports. Discrepancy in the rate of echocardiographic diagnosis of MVP in PD/AgP may be due to different criteria used in evaluating the echocardiogram. In this study, 15 echocardiograms performed on patients with PD/AgP were evaluated by two separate expert echocardiographers. Each used his own standard criteria for diagnosing MVP. The first reader diagnosed MVP in 9 of 15 patients with PD/AgP while the second did not diagnose MVP in any of the 15 patients. This substantiates the belief that criteria variance strongly influences estimates of the prevalence of MVP among patients with PD/AgP.