Anxiety disorders – Course, natural history, and prognosis

DSM diagnostic criteria may not fully capture the persistence of depressive and anxiety symptoms over time, as recovery according to DSM criteria does not necessarily coincide with symptomatic recovery.⁴ This was demonstrated by the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anx…

Some patients with anxiety disorders, e.g. patients with generalized anxiety disorder, may be experiencing persistent anxiety without a precipitating stressor; subsequently, a stressor may exacerbate this baseline level of anxiety.⁴ This phenomenon is called ‘double anxie…

This study used data from a cohort study to create a nine-stage model of anxiety disorder progression (from subclinical stages [0, 1A, 1B] to clinical stages [2A–4B]), which was found to have construct and predictive validity.¹ A valid staging model of anxiety disorders w…

The Delphi consensus recommendations for treatment-resistant anxiety disorders are intended as a systematic, consistent and practical guideline to define this condition and thereby aid in designing future clinical trials for regulatory purposes as well as other research p…

Some tools exist that can be useful to assess psychosocial functioning or quality of life in anxiety disorders, such as the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS), the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0 (WHODAS 2.0), and the Quality of Life Enjoyment and…

Social anxiety disorder can be a chronic disorder, associated with serious impairments in different areas of life and with lower rates of recovery than other anxiety disorders.¹ Standardized remission and recovery criteria, accounting for residual symptoms, comorbid disor…

Specific targets of fear and anxieties (e.g., strange people, other animals, contaminants) emerge at specific stages of development, and their order of appearance is surprisingly stable among children from vastly different social and cultural environments, ranging from no…

Anxiety disorders were found to have a significantly higher 30-day and 12-month prevalence of anxiety disorders in girls than in boys (with most odds ratios in the range of 1.5–2.5), suggesting a more persistent course of anxiety disorders in girls than in boys.¹

Referenc…

Patients experiencing ‘double anxiety’ often have other comorbid anxiety or depressive disorders.¹

References:
1. Rickels K, Schweizer E. The clinical presentation of generalized anxiety in primary-care settings: practical concepts of classification and management. J Clin…

Specific phobia is a highly persistent disorder, and its persistence increases with the number of subtypes present (with a persistence of ~75% observed for people with one subtype of specific phobia, including early-onset specific phobia, rising to a persistence of ~85% f…