Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Published in Stephen M. Stahl, Bret A. Moore, Anxiety Disorders: A Guide for Integrating Psychopharmacology and Psychotherapy, 2013
Joseph E. Comaty, Claire Advokat
Although current pharmacological and behavioral GAD treatments leave much room for improvement, efforts to address therapeutic limitations continue. One study reported positive results on the HAM-A, and an excellent safety profile, with an experimental drug, ocinaplon, that is a positive allosteric modulator of the GABAA receptor (Czobor, Skolnick, Beer, & Lippa, 2010). A reexamination of opioids in the neurobiology of anxiety has recently been proposed (Colasanti, Rabiner, Lingford-Hughes, & Nutt, 2011). Similarly, a recent neurobiological analysis of fear extinction discusses the relevance of this behavioral paradigm to the anxiety disorders (Graham & Milad, 2011). Clearly, the need for more effective methods of treating generalized anxiety disorder is recognized and new developments are in progress.