Overall , a general lack of efficacy of SGAs on panic symptoms was observed .
Except for ziprasidone , SGAs were well tolerated in these short-term trials
A role for second-generation antipsychotics ( SGAs ) in the treatment of  panic disorders ( PD ) has been proposed , but the actual usefulness of SGAs in this disorder is unclear .
Influence of panic-agoraphobic spectrum symptoms on treatment response in patients with recurrent major depression.
OBJECTIVE The authors tested the hypothesis that a lifetime history of panic-agoraphobic spectrum symptoms predicts a poorer response to  depression treatment . METHOD A threshold for clinical ly meaningful panic-agoraphobic spectrum symptoms was defined by means of receiver operating characteristic curve analysis of total scores on the Structured Clinical Interview for Panic-Agoraphobic Spectrum in a group of 88 out patients with and without panic disorder . This threshold was then applied to a group of 61 women with recurrent major depression , who completed a self-report version of the same instrument , in order to compare treatment outcomes for patients above and below this clinical threshold . RESULTS Women with high scores ( > or = 35 ) on the Panic-Agoraphobic Spectrum Self-Report were less likely than women with low scores ( < 35 ) to respond to interpersonal psychotherapy alone ( 43.5 % versus 68.4 % , respectively ) . Women with high scores also took longer ( 18.1 versus 10.3 weeks ) to respond to a sequential treatment paradigm ( adding a  selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor  when depression did not remit with interpersonal psychotherapy alone ) . This effect was only partially accounted for by the higher likelihood that patients with high scores required the addition of antidepressants . Although four domains from the Panic-Agoraphobic Spectrum Self-Report were individually associated with a longer time to remission , only stress sensitivity emerged as significant in multivariate regression analyses . CONCLUSIONS A lifetime burden of panic-agoraphobic spectrum symptoms predicted a poorer response to  interpersonal psychotherapy  and an 8-week delay in sequential treatment response among women with recurrent depression . These results lend clinical validity to the spectrum construct and highlight the need for alternate psychotherapeutic and pharmacologic strategies to treat depressed patients with panic spectrum features
Overall , a general lack of efficacy of SGAs on panic symptoms was observed .
Except for ziprasidone , SGAs were well tolerated in these short-term trials
A role for second-generation antipsychotics ( SGAs ) in the treatment of  panic disorders ( PD ) has been proposed , but the actual usefulness of SGAs in this disorder is unclear .