Abstract
Anxiety disorders are a group of mental disorders that range in their severity from occasional, brief episodes of relatively benign nervous tension to severe, recurrent and disabling panic attacks that interfere with activities of daily living. In addition to the suffering of the affected individual, anxiety disorders have larger social and economic ramifications, such as loss of workplace productivity.1 Treatment approaches to anxiety disorders include psychoanalytic, cognitive, and pharmacologic therapies. At present, state of the art Western medical therapies for anxiety rely heavily on anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) pharmaceuticals, some of which have sedative and cognitive side effects. Since the 1960’s, when the prototypic anxiolytic drug diazepam (valium) was discovered serendipitously by L. Sternbach and E. Reeder2, antianxiety drugs have undergone refinement with the goal of reducing undesirable sedative and amnestic side effects. Advances in the fields of neurobiology and psychology have yielded insights into the neurotransmitter systems involved in fear and anxiety responses that have facilitated the development of more selective anxiolytic drugs.3–5
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Roberts, A.A. (2004). Testing Efficacy of Natural Anxiolytic Compounds. In: Cooper, E.L., Yamaguchi, N. (eds) Complementary and Alternative Approaches to Biomedicine. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 546. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4820-8_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4820-8_13
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