the comtval158met polymorphism is associated with symptom relief during exposure-based cognitive-behavioral treatment in panic disordercomtval158met多态性与症状相关救援期间暴露认知行为治疗恐慌症.pdf

Lonsdorf et al. BMC Psychiatry 2010, 10:99 /1471-244X/10/99 RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access The COMTval158met polymorphism is associated with symptom relief during exposure-based cognitive-behavioral treatment in panic disorder 1,3,4,5,7* 2 2 2,6 1,4,5 2 Tina B Lonsdorf , Christian Rück , Jan Bergström , Gerhard Andersson , Arne Öhman , Nils Lindefors , Martin Schalling3 Abstract Background: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) represents a learning process leading to symptom relief and resulting in long-term changes in behavior. CBT for panic disorder is based on exposure and exposure-based processes can be studied in the laboratory as extinction of experimentally acquired fear responses. We have recently demonstrated that the ability to extinguish learned fear responses is associated with a functional genetic polymorphism (COMTval158met) in the COMT gene and this study was aimed at transferring the experimental results on the COMTval158met polymorphism on extinction into a clinical setting. Methods: We tested a possible effect of the COMTval158met polymorphism on the efficacy of CBT, in particular exposure-based treatment modules, in a sample of 69 panic disorder patients. Results: We present evidence that panic patients with the COMTval158met met/met genotype may profit less from (exposure-based) CBT treatment methods as compared to patients carrying at least one val-allele. No association was found with the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 genotypes which is presented as additional material. Conclusions: We were thus able to transfer findings on the effect of the COMTval158met polymorphism from an experimental extinction study obtained using healthy subjects to a clinical setting. Furthermore p