Do panic disorder patients indiscriminately endorse somatic complaints?

Ehlers et al. (1986b) and Margraf et al. (1986) suggested that panic disorder patients indiscriminately endorse somatic complaints and that their responses to lactate infusion are nonspecific. Their Symptom Questionnaire was composed of anxiety/panic/lactate infusion relevant symptoms, while the Somatic Control Scale was composed of "irrelevant" symptoms. In an attempt to address and in part replicate the above findings among panic disorder patients, we adopted the SCS of Margraf et al. (1986) for use with our Acute Panic Inventory, an instrument similar to their Symptom Questionnaire. Contrary to their reports, we did not find a tendency for panic patients to indiscriminately endorse somatic complaints. Only Acute Panic Inventory scores differed significantly across assessment points.