Understanding the “Panic” Within the Panic Attack Disorder

In this article, you will find that fear and panic are not the same thing, and how understanding that helped us take a step towards developing new medication for the Panic Attack Disorder.

Panic attack disorder is a debilitating condition during which uncontrollable bouts of panic can happen in a person’s life without any rhyme or reason. So, the fact that we still haven’t developed truly impactful treatment for it is harmful to effected people’s lives.

When we think about anxiety disorders such as generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorders can often come to mind as well, since most people think they are both driven by fear or anxiety. This makes sense as we usually think that panic stems from fear itself. Which is also why this whole time it was treated by the same treatment as anxiety disorders.

However, the truth is they are quite different to our brain. A study by Kang et al., published in Nature Neuroscience (2024), found that there is a significant difference between how the brain reacts to panic versus general anxiety. They studied mice and found when they were in the state of panic, their brain responded by sending out chemical communicators called PACAP. But when the mice were frightened or anxious, those communicators were nowhere to be seen. This shows us that panic and anxiety/fear are involved in separate processes and trigger different chemical communicators.

So, if different communicators are released in those processes, it means we cannot use the same treatment for both. Since anxiety is usually treated using SSRIs that address serotonin reuptake (chemical communicators that are responsible for anxiety), we need to produce a treatment that focuses on PACAP to treat panic disorder as it is the communicator that is directly responsible for panic.

These findings are truly insightful and will help researchers make a significant step in treating panic disorders later down the line. The only thing standing in the way is that the studies have been done on mice and not on humans, so there still must be rigorous testing and research done on animals and humans to make sure it can safely be used as a medicine.