It's Not Your Heart: Group Treatment for Non-Cardiac Chest Pain

Abstract

This article presents a brief group psychoeducational treatment for non-cardiac chest pain, supplemented with a composite case study. Patients present to emergency rooms for chest pain they believe is a heart attack symptom. When cardiac testing is negative, this pain is usually a panic symptom, often occurring with a cluster of other panic symptoms. Group therapy challenges faulty beliefs about the origin of their chest pain and offers an alternate explanatory model. Breathing retraining and other strategies to lower physical arousal reduce the duration and frequency of panic (chest pain) episodes. These new skills can eventually break the continual cycle of panic and anxious apprehension.

Can scent-detection dogs detect the stress associated with trauma cue exposure in people with trauma histories? A proof-of-concept study

“…Lastly, the use of self-report to measure human response to the trauma cue exposure could have minimised correlations between the dogs' performance and donors' response. Although we selected measures with good psychometric properties, and tapped subjective experience to which only the individual has access ( 115 ), self-reports entail a relatively high risk of bias including minimising or misinterpreting emotional symptoms ( 116 – 120 ). Thus, self-reports are informative but imperfect reflections of the VOCs emitted during trauma cue exposure.…”