Abstract
Two major therapeutic approaches, medication such as SSRI and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), are taken for anxiety disorder. However, their efficacy is often not sufficient and has large individual difference. Some kind of biological background must underlie such individual difference. In this review, we discussed the issue from the two points of view, i. e., sensory gating measured as an event related potential of P50 and an animal model of fear conditioning/extinction paradigm. Impaired P50 response was observed in obsessive- compulsive disorder, which suggests disrupted sensory gating mechanism underlies the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders. Clinical strategies for effective fear extinction can be well simulated in the animal model, and cognitive enhancing agent such as D-cycloserine could be a candidate for newer approach in fear extinction learning.
