Detecting Panic Attacks in Advance

Researchers at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) have determined that panic attacks are not triggered instantly, but rather evolve over a short time. They say that a new method developed by an SMU team could allow for the detection of ensuing attack a full hour in advance.

This study goes up against the established dogma of the international scientific community, which holds that such attacks are triggered on the spot, without any type of warning. The team says that the indications are there.

Until now, they add, experts did not know what to look for. The first symptoms of an approaching panic attack are very subtle, and can be hard to detect. The new investigation was conducted by outfitting study participants with wearing portable recorders.

Over a period of 24 hours, these instruments monitored a number of body functions. After analyzing the data, the SMU group determined that distortions in heart rate and respiration, among other functions, occur about 60 minutes before the actual attack.

Dr. Alicia E. Meuret, a psychologist at the university, says that panic attacks may very well be the result of accumulating physiological instabilities. Individually, each of these would be utterly insufficient to have any type of discernible effect.

However, when more gather together in a consistent pattern, they set the stage for an attack. At the same time, the monitoring devices indicate that patients who are prone to suffering from this condition tend to experience chronic hyperventilation.

“The results were just amazing. We found that in this hour preceding naturally occurring panic attacks, there was a lot of physiological instability. These significant physiological instabilities were not present during other times when the patient wasn’t about to have a panic attack,” Meuret explains.

Interestingly, these “changes don’t seem to enter the patient’s awareness. What they report is what happens at the end of the 60 minutes – that they’re having an out-of-the blue panic attack with a lot of intense physical sensations,” she adds, quoted by PsychCentral.

“We had expected the majority of the physiological activation would occur during and following the onset of the panic attack. But what we actually found was very little additional physiological change at that time,” the expert goes on to say.

Details of the new research were published in the latest issue of the medical journal Biological Psychiatry.

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