The cortisol stress response and its relation to psychotherapy outcome in panic disorder patients

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2018 in the subject Psychology - Biological Psychology, grade: 1,0, Dresden Technical University, language: English, abstract: Although effective treatment is available for panic disorder (PD), a proportion of patients experience an incomplete remission and relapses after the first-line psychotherapeutic treatment. To date, previous research has been unable to identify reliable therapy outcome predictors of a psychological or disorder-related kind. Initial attempts to understand the aetiology and treatment of PD put an emphasis on biological models, failed however to examine potential biological predictors for therapy success. Further, for understanding the biological correlates of PD, previous reports focused extensively on the distinction of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-(HPA) axis-mediated cortisol stress response when comparing patient samples and healthy populations, with little emphasis on a direct comparison of patient groups. In comparison with healthy individuals, cortisol hypo-responsiveness is a relatively consistent finding in panic-centric research. Thus, the current thesis is aimed at improving the existing knowledge about the cortisol stress response in PD patients with and without agoraphobia in relation to other psychiatric disorders as well as in reference to the psychotherapy success.