Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Racial differences in panic disorder

From the Fall 2009 issue of CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics:

The current study investigates race-ethnic differences in rates of panic disorder, panic attacks and certain panic attack symptoms by jointly combining three major national epidemiological databases. The compared groups were White, African American, Latino and Asian. The White group had significantly higher rates of panic disorder, and of many panic symptoms, including palpitations, as compared to the African American, Asian and Latino groups.

Here's a table which shows more detail:












The rates tend to go like this: Caucasian > African > Hispanic > Asian, but clearly whites are higher than the rest.

According to this study, heritability for panic disorder is .44.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous9:13 AM

    This is noteworthy because it's one of the very rare instances of a study where the outcome for whites did not fall somewhere in between blacks and Asians.

    ReplyDelete

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