Rejoinder to Commentary: "Panic, Self Disorder, and EASE Research: Methodological Considerations"
(only some of which have sub items) But given our purposes, maximum qualitative detail was critical, since our main purpose involved seeking the richest possible phenomenological assessment. We have, however, reanalyzed our data using only the 57 EASE items, and this leads to an average score of 13.11 8.8 (mean SD) versus our initial 17.94 11.88. We regret that we did not include this analysis in our original paper. However, using this result does not change our discussion, namely, that our scores are indeed " somewhat lower than (schizophrenia studies) but considerably higher than those reported for bipolar psychosis (average of 6.3) and other mental disorders (average of 8.1) in the just cited comparative studies " The commentary suggests that PD is a "trans diagnostic category" (in contrast with our claim that some selfdisorders could be trans diagnostic) whose presence in our sample would increase the odds ratio of a future diagnosis of psychosis. This suggestion contradicts the best available epidemiological evidence, which indicates that PD, despite its comorbidities, is a stable diagnostic category [6] We note also that our own sample is not (as they claim) "peculiar" in lacking comorbidities since it was intentionally selected on that very basis (with inclusion criterion "diagnosis of panic disorder and no other diagnoOur aim in this rejoinder is to reply to the comment by Parnas et al. [1] on our recent paper in Psychopathology on self disorders in panic disorder (PD) [2] Their comment makes a series of incorrect or misleading claims. The comment starts by stating that our sample is " chronic " and " treatment resistant " and that we aimed to compare our PD subjects' scores with the scores of schizophrenia subjects. Both claims are incorrect. Our sample is not, in fact, especially chronic given that recurrent panic attacks are actually a criterion for the very diagnosis of PD [3] Nor does failure of a 1 month treatment in General Practice Clinics (also characteristic of our subjects) qualify as clinical treatment resistance. The general remission rate of PD in general is 80% in the second year of treatment [4, 5] and perhaps only at that point should patients be considered resistant Contrary to what the comment implies, our study was not devised to provide a direct comparison of patient groups; for that we would have had to include both PD and schizophrenia samples. Our aim, rather, was to examine the presence, and the profile, of self disorders in PD: " to explore the profile of specific types of ASEs any possible patterns that might be revealed " [2] The comment also criticizes our consideration of all the 94 EASE items or sub items rather than only the 57 items Received: May 7, 2017 Accepted after revision: May 10, 2017 Published online: June 10, 2017
Psychopathology