공황장애의 평가

Abstract

The four general areas to be evaluated in cases of panic disorder are (1) medical status, (2) phenomenology and history of panic auld agoraphobia, (3) comorbidity and history of other psychiatric disorders, and (4) predisposing and precipitating factors for panic attacks and factors maintaining the panic disorder. The assessment also involves information about how panic-disordered individuals behave on the five major response systems and their interaction: cognitive, behavioral, affective, physiological, and social. In order to tap into these different areas and response systems, clinicians should use a variety of measurement techniques: clinical interviews, self-report scales, self-monitoring, behavioral observation, psychophysiological monitoring. The use of a simple, psychometrically sound instrument such as Panic Disorder Severity Scale(PDSS), which considers all of the essential domains of panic disorder, will provide clinicians with an appropriate measure for diagnosing and monitoring patients. The application of this more comprehensive scale for monitoring patient should alert clinicians to reemergence of associated symptoms of panic disorder and allow for the rapid modification of treatment. All of the investigators who conduct any study of panic disorder should consider the essential, recommended, optional measures agreed in Consensus Development Conference on the treatment of panic disorder in 1992 and implement them in their research. Then the results of study from different laboratories will be easier to compare.