When it’s not just depression: the Living with Anxiety study

Unlike other branches of medicine, psychiatric diagnoses are based solely on symptom presentation which means there is no expectation that a group of individuals who have the same diagnosis, or group of disorders, will have developed the problem due to the same underlying cause. Consider for example, mood and anxiety disorders, while, both of these disorders are complex and heterogeneous, with many shared causal factors, they also exist as distinct disorders. Despite the strong lifelong relationships between mood and anxiety disorders there are distinct patterns of symptoms, trajectories of illness onset and cause, and quite variable treatment pathways and experiences of treatment. We have designed the Living with Anxiety study to improve our understanding of the causes of anxiety disorders and the ways in which they are distinct from mood disorders, provide better estimates of the effects of pharmacogenomic variants and better understand the impact of the common comorbidity of mood and anxiety disorders on estimates of medication efficacy.