The aim of our study was detection of brain electrical activity changes in panic disorder (PD) patients by means of the electromagnetic tomography. Several observations suggest the panic disorder should be characterized by right frontal hyperactivation (Wiedemann et al., 1999).

Electroencephalograms of 33 panic disorder patients (9 men and 24 women) were compared with the same number of age and gender matched control subjects. EEG was recorded in the resting state with a 19-channel amplifier. 3-dimensional distribution of the current density was revealed by a method of quantitative electroencephalography - Low Resolution Brain Electromagentic Tomography (LORETA, Pascual-Marqui et al. 1994)

There was increase in the beta1 and beta2 frequency band over the frontal cortex including the insula and orbitofrontal cortex (p<0.01) with right side maximum in panic disorder patients. Also bilateral decrease in the alpha band over the occipital cortex including precuneus and posterior cingulate (p<0.02) was found.

The findings of our study confirmed hypothesis of frontal brain asymmetry with higher level of right hemisphere activation in panic disorder patients. These data are the first evidence of applying LORETA method to panic disorder studying.

This study was supported by the project MZ0PCP2005