Selective Attention to Threatening Information in Anxious Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

The prevalence of panic disorder in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), an illness which leads to progressively worsening shortness of breath in older adults, is estimated to be at least ten times higher than the prevalence in the wider population, and panic attacks are common. On the basis of previous studies investigating selective attentional bias in anxiety disorders, we hypothesised that COPD patients with panic attacks or panic disorder would show an attentional bias towards relevant threat words on the visual dot-probe selective attention task, compared to COPD patients without panic or healthy controls. Instead we found, in a high-objective threat value experimental situation, a bias towards positive words in the COPD panic group, which was influenced by subjects’ level of depression, and a bias towards threat words in the COPD patients without panic and healthy control groups. Possible explanations for these results are discussed.