A recent study suggests that menopausal women with panic disorder and many occurrences of panic attacks have a threefold higher risk of suffering heart attack or stroke over the next five years. The researchers believe that panic attacks or more accurately their associated symptoms (chest pain, dyspnea) can be manifestations of undiagnosed cardiovascular disease, or result in heart damage due to cardiovascular stress in patients with panic disorder and many panic attacks over periods of years.
The study did not find that isolated cases of panic attacks in patients without panic disorder or agoraphobia lead to immediate heart damage, nor did it prove that the correlation between panic disorder and strokes was causal, or that it couldn't be attributed to the cardiovascular effects of medication that many panic disorder patients receive, such as SSRIs and benzodiazepines. For example one study albeit in the elderly found that the consumption of benzodiazepines combined with analgesics in elderly men is correlated with an increased risk of dying of ischaemic heart disease in a small study. The study doesn't say if this is to be blamed on the benzodiazepine drug in this case nitrazepam, the analgetics or their combination.
