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Christopher Bass, MD, MRCPsych
Department of Psychological Medicine

W. N. Gardner, DPhil, MRCP
Department of Thoracic Medicine Kings College Hospital SE5 9RS London England

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1988;45(1):95-96.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Gorman et al1 urge that further work be aimed at defining the nature of ventilatory abnormalities in patients with panic disorder (PD) but do not elaborate on the substantial body of work that has already been published in this field. The important association between agoraphobia and hyperventilation (HV)-related complaints has already been established in different populations,^2,3 and we have shown that some patients with agoraphobia and PD spend large portions of the waking day in the hypocapnic range (carbon dioxide partial pressure [Pco₂], <30 mm Hg).^4,5 For those patients at or close to the threshold for hypocapnia, relatively minor stressors, such as exercise, talking, or even exposure to phobic talk,⁶ may provoke sudden reductions in Pco₂ that are accompanied by somatic symptoms and panic anxiety. Rapee⁷ also demonstrated that patients with PD had not only lower resting end-tidal Pco₂ and . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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