Shorter communicationA test of the relations between avoidance of panic-related situations and substance use, substance dependence, and depression among subclinical panickers
Section snippets
Method
Data from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication (NCS-R) were examined. The NCS-R was an epidemiological study employed across the continental United States, intended to assess the prevalence of DSM-IV (APA, 1994) psychiatric disorders among English-speaking adults, 18 years or older (Kessler & Merikangas, 2004). Information was collected via face-to-face in-home interviews between February 2001 and April 2003, yielding a response rate of 70.9%.
Descriptive data
Within part II of the NCS-R sample, 20.9% of participants reported a lifetime panic attack history without meeting criteria for a lifetime diagnosis of PD. Of these, 27.5% met lifetime criteria for MDD, 5.7% for drug dependence, 8.3% for alcohol dependence, and 12.7% for nicotine dependence. The average number of lifetime panic attacks among subclinical panickers was 10.24 (SE = 0.86). Table 1 includes demographic information and lifetime diagnostic prevalence rates of the sample.
Hypothesis tests
Table 2 includes
Discussion
Researchers have documented that broad-based avoidance of negative affect is associated with elevated substance use and depression among people with panic-spectrum problems (Bibb and Chambless, 1986, Holahan et al., 2005, Marshall et al., 2008, Moulds et al., 2007, Ottenbreit and Dobson, 2004, Zvolensky et al., 2008). The current study uniquely extended this area of research by investigating the relation between substance use/dependence, depression, and avoidance of panic-related situations
Acknowledgements
This paper was supported in part by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contract (U49 CE001248) and a Department of Defense grant (PT073945) with Dr. Feldner.
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