Explore the Medical Utilization and Quality of Life among Patients with Panic Disorder

This is a three-year project. In the first year, the objective of this project is to compare the medical utilization between patients with and without panic disorder (PD). Prior studies always used the data from a few selected hospitals or survey research. Their findings cannot be generalized to the whole population. We will use the National Health Insurance Research Dataset in order to reduce the selection bias or recall bias. In the second year, the objective is to explore the quality of life and anxiety status among patients with PD by using WHOQOL and CABI. The study subjects will be recruited from Wang-Fan hospital and Taipei City hospital, Songde Branch. In the third year, we will aim to use the National Health Insurance Research Datase to document the risk of a range of psychiatric and physical comorbidities among PD patients. PD patients’risk for various comorbid conditions will be compared with that of the general population, using medical diagnoses in a claims dataset to identify diseases. This three-year project can help the health authority and clinicians understand the medical utilization, quality of life and comorbidities among patients with PD in Taiwan.