Panic Disorder (PD) is one of the most common anxiety disorders. In spite of several available medications, there are unsatisfactory outcomes in a considerable proportion of PD patients and novel treatment approaches are lacking. Given that response to pharmacotherapeutical and psychological treatments occur after long intervals and medications may cause substantial adverse effects which may affect treatment compliance, fast acting and well-tolerated treatments such as non-invasive brain stimulation are considered to be useful as primary treatment approach or as an add-on treatment in PD. Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) trials targeting prefrontal cortex mostly reported favorable outcomes in PD.~Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) is another promising non-invasive brain stimulation method with numerous distinctive aspects including its low-cost, robust safety and tolerability, low dropout rates, easy application, reliable blinding procedures and the opportunity to use concomitantly with other treatments. Left anodal/right anodal tDCS over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been demonstrated to decrease attentional bias and amygdala reactivity to threat in individuals with high trait anxiety. Moreover, a treatment-resistant case of PD was reported to have significant amelioration of symptoms up to one month after 10 sessions of tDCS.~The study is a triple-blind randomized controlled trial. The sample will be consisted of thirty participants diagnosed as having PD due to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria. The participants will be assigned to active or sham groups equally. Clinical severity will be assessed with adequate scales. Emotion recognition, attentional bias to threat and interoceptive accuracy will also be measured. Then, participants will be applied ten active or sham sessions of left anodal/right cathodal tDCS over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). All measurements will be repeated after the applications. Succinctly, the aim of this study is to assess the effect of ten sessions left anodal/right cathodal tDCS over the DLPFC on clinical severity, attentional bias and interoceptive accuracy in PD.
The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of prefrontal transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) on clinical severity, attentional bias and interoceptive accuracy in panic disorder (PD).~The participants will be assigned to active and sham groups (1:1) and will receive 10 sessions of tDCS. The study will also examine if the effects may last for a month.