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Female Gender May be Negative Predictor of Remission During Stabilisation Treatment of Panic Disorder Treatment: Presented at ADAA

By Jill Stein

ST. LOUIS, MO -- April 3, 2007 -- Women with panic disorder may not respond as well as men to drug treatment, according to early results presented here at the 27^th Annual Meeting of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADAA).

In a presentation on March 31^st, Andrew Goddard, MD, professor of psychiatry, Indiana University, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, reported preliminary data on predictors of remission in an ongoing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor/benzodiazepine treatment study.

In the trial, patients are receiving open-label sertraline for 12 weeks and are also randomized to 4 weeks of active alprazolam XR or placebo. Alprazolam XR is then tapered over 3 weeks and discontinued.

Evaluable data in 58 patients randomised to date identified female gender as a potential negative predictor of clinical remission status (regression step 1; B = -1.15, SE = 0.59, P < .054).

"The data suggest that women may be roughly one-third times more likely than men to not get into a remission state after initial treatment," Dr. Goddard said.

Age, baseline score on the Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS), baseline score on the Clinical Global Impression-Severity, and baseline agoraphobia level had no significant effect on later remission.

Dr. Goddard said that this patient population is more clinically heterogeneous than that in standard phase 3 multi-site populations, in which early clinical improvement rather than specific demographics or baseline clinical features has been identified as the major predictor of later remission state.

If confirmed in the completed trial sample, the results would indicate that pharmacotherapy responses in female panic patients in the community are not as robust or stable as in males and that more aggressive combination therapy approaches over an extended period may be needed to achieve full remission in this patient subgroup, Dr. Goddard said.

The study was sponsored by Pfizer Inc.


[Presentation title: Baseline Clinical Predictors of Remission During Stabilization Treatment of Panic Disorder. Abstract P24]

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