Does Benzodiazepine Use Have Negative Effects in Patients with Anxiety?

Individuals with anxiety disorders are especially sensitive to anxiety-related cues. This sensitivity to "threat" cues is frequently evident on the Stroop task where individuals name the ink color of stimulus words; when faced with anxiety-relevant words, anxiety patients tend to name colors more slowly and are less able to inhibit the processing of disorder-relevant "threat" words than healthy controls. Hypothesizing that benzodiazepine taken as needed may enhance, rather than ameliorate, the sensitivity to physical-threat cues, these investigators used the Stroop task to examine the association between benzodiazepine use and sensitivity to words of physical and social threat (e.g., "dizzy" and "embarrass") in 50 patients with anxiety diso…