Just back from NYC where I met with Moose Struening at the Columbia's program in Clinical Epidemiology. We've been working on a large data set of about 20,000 respondents from the National Anxiet Disorders Screening Day. One thing is quite clear: In real life, most people with anxiety problems have more than one problem and very, very few meet criteria for only one disorder. So, many might have generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and social phobia, while very few would have, say, just social phobia. This may seem obvious to anxiety sufferers, but the implications for treatment are tremendous...most clinical studies of anxiety or depression focus on one disorder at a time (e.g., Zoloft or Prozac for Major Depression) even though very few have only Major Depression. Co-morbidity is the rule, not the exception, and researchers have ignored this fact for years. We've published several papers on this topic, but I assume it will take several years before people "get it."
The implications for Asperger's are also tremendous in that we must ask, for each person, what else are they experiencing or suffering from, in addition to their Asperger's symptoms.
11:43:51 AM 
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