Reply to Letter to the Editor "Panic and Paranoia"

Letter to the Editor

Sir: We appreciate Dr. Bermanzohn and colleagues' interest in our report. The relationship between panic attacks, psychosis, and schizophrenia is an intriguing one, and we are grateful to the authors for emphasizing a possible etiologic role of panic attacks in schizophrenia. The overlap between panic attacks and psychosis plus the complexity of underlying neuroanatomical depressubstrates also underscores the limitations of the currently prevailing categorical approach to psychiatric symptoms, which often disregards such relationships. An alternative dimensional approach emphasizes continuity of psychiatric symptomatology and corresponding neurobiology across diagnostic categories.