Comorbid Anxiety Disorder Among Patients With Substance Abuse Disorders

Abstract

The authors sought to determine whether early assessment of newly abstinent alcoholic/addicted patients can help identify those patients at risk for later anxiety disorder (AD). Diagnoses of AD were made after 3 weeks. From a sample of 642 consecutive outpatients and inpatients, 294 were assessed as having only substance‐related disorders (SRD) and 36 had both an SRD and an AD. The remaining 312 patients had other comorbid conditions with SRD. After 3 weeks of abstinence (Time 2), a psychiatrist made a current DSM‐III‐R diagnosis based on all available data. This study revealed that the following characteristics at Time 1 (intake) were associated with diagnosis of an AD at Time 2: female sex, history of panic attacks or suicidal ideation, previous outpatient care, previous antidepressant or neuroleptic medication, and higher scores on most of the self‐rated scales and all of the psychiatric scales.