Anxiety at the Frontier of Molecular Medicine

Anxiety is a ubiquitous and unavoidable experience of life. It can be adaptive but also debilitating. Anxiety involves subjective feelings (e.g., worry and a sense of threat), physiological responses (e.g., tachycardia and hypercortisolemia), and behavioral responses (e.g., avoidance and withdrawal). Anxiety and fear share many subjective and physiological characteristics, and there is much debate about how best to distinguish them. Fear, as characterized by Walter Cannon in the 1920s, is generally viewed as a reaction to danger, whereas anxiety is a feeling of fear that is out of proportion to any real threat. When anxiety is persistent and intrusive, it . . .