It's one of the most common medical conditions on the planet so why are the causes of anxiety still such a mystery? Scientists are working to unravel it.One minute I was cooking dinner, monitoring babies, bath time, work emails, phone calls, deadlines and life admin. The next, the room was spinning.
For some, it is a fleeting experience like mine and many anxiety sufferers respond well to existing treatments including cognitive behaviour therapy or medication. Yet for others, anxiety can be a crippling and chronic disability impacting all areas of life without relief., with GPs and psychologists reporting a spike in patients seeking help for anxious feelings.
At the Institute's Translational Neurogenomics Lab, Thorp is using a global database of 400,000 people to identify gene variants more common in anxiety sufferers. The next step is to understand their role in predisposing someone to anxiety or whether specific genetic mutations could even predict it. A great many cases of anxiety are triggered by unknown causes, often environmental, Thorp says. "You may have a high genetic risk but if you don't have that environmental trigger then perhaps you won’t develop anxiety at all," he says.