GENERALIZED ANXIETY AND PANIC DISORDERS - RESPONSE

Contrary to the contention of Cox, Cohen, Direnfeld and Swinson (1996, Behaviour Research and Therapy. 34, 949-954) that the Beck Anxiety In ventory (BAI; Beck & Steer, 1993, Manual for the Beck Anxiety Inventor y) measures primarily symptoms associated with panic attacks rather th an anxiety in general, we propose that the higher level of anxiety fou nd in patients with panic disorders not only is not an artifact of the BAI's symptom content, but patients with panic disorders truly have m ore anxiety than patients with other types of anxiety disorders. Furth ermore, the BAI contains symptoms present in other anxiety disorders, besides panic disorder, and specifically includes 11 symptoms of gener alized anxiety disorder (GAD). The BAI and revised Hamilton Anxiety Ra ting Scale (HARS-R; Riskind, Beck, Brown & Steer, 1987, Journal of Ner vous and Mental Disease, 175, 474-479) scores of 274 (69%) outpatients with panic disorders and 123 (31%) outpatients with GAD were found to differentiate these two diagnostic groups equally and significantly. The panic disorder outpatients had higher scores on both the BAI and t he HARS-R than did the GAD patients. Thus, Cox et al.'s (1996) specula tion about the BAI's yielding spuriously high levels of anxiety in pat ients with panic disorders revives an important issue relevant to the relation of panic disorder to GAD. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd