LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Atrial natriuretic hormone responses to clonidine in patients with panic disorder and in healthy control subjects Recently, Baranowska et al. (1) reported that i.v. injection of 0.15 mg clonidine significantly increased plasma atrial natriuretic hormone (ANH) concentra-tions in normal-weighted and obese women within 15 min. Thus, they extended their preclinical findings showing that stimulation of the a-2-adrenergic recep-tors is a very potent signal for ANH secretion in both normally-hydrated and water-deprived rats (2, 3). Against the background of ANH hypersecretion by a panicogenic sodium lactate infusion (4) and a down-regulation of the a-2 receptor function in patients with panic disorder (5), we studied the response of ANH to clonidine in these subjects and in healthy controls