Anxiety Panic Disorder and Panic Attack
A panic anxiety disorder is characterized by the appearance of severe and sudden episodes of very intense symptoms such as accelerated heart beat, intense sweating, limb shaking, confusion, terror, the feeling of death imminence or craziness, sense alertness, pupil dilation, choking the impulse to run or scream and so on. If the cause of the panic attack is not in a life-threatening situation or in a specific medical ailment, then, the diagnosis could be anxiety panic disorder. Usually, before turning into anxiety panic disorder, any panic attack could be accidental and unique of its kind.
Normally, a panic attack reaches its peak intensity within a minute or two and then decreases to a state of normality over the next thirty minutes or next several hours. The specificity of an anxiety panic disorder comes from the frequency of the attacks, usually of an unequal intensity. Thus, one gets to suffer from several such anxiety bouts every month, which is enough to feel terrorized and threatened all the time, thus worsening the condition and deepening the fear.
Most patients of anxiety panic attack disorder are women between twenty and thirty. The problem is less frequent in younger or older age groups; plus it is usually favored by a separation trauma experienced by the patient some time during childhood. The beginning of an anxiety panic disorder may be gradual or abrupt, meaning that you can start having symptoms some time in advance before the full anxiety bout, or the panic may strike you out of the blue.
In certain cases an anxiety panic disorder is so very difficult to diagnose because of the inconclusive medical evaluations. Lots of people thus spend weeks, months or years going from specialist to specialist, receiving all sorts of opinions and treatment options. Unless correct evaluation and diagnosis is made, the patient could go through a whole ordeal. On the other hand, many diagnosed patients start avoiding certain situations for fear of developing an anxiety episode.
Some of the situations or locations that sufferers from anxiety panic disorder avoid include social reunions, classes, meetings or church services, shopping malls, restaurants, airplanes, elevators and so on. If not treated right, an anxiety panic disorder may radically change a patient's life ruining day-to-day activities, causing depression and many other problems. Plus, the cases of self-medication, alcohol abuse and suicide are also related to the impossibility to cope with anxiety and its symptoms.