Anxiety disorder symptoms

Posted by admin on Feb 25, 2010 in Diagnostics | 0 comments

Anxiety disorder symptoms and their understanding are important not only for psychiatrists, but also for other medical professionals. Doctors of all specialties must recognize and diagnose causes of anxiety attacks because anxiety and panic, tension, emotions of disturbing lines, and stress are frequent findings in patients with different conditions and diseases. Anxiety is one of the most common problems and usually appears rather early in life.

Anxiety is understood as a feeling of horror, terror, dread, and apprehension that emerges without a comprehensible or explainable reason. Anxiety may be a reaction to actually inoffensive conditions that become fear-provoking events for the patients. Among anxiety disorder symptoms the experience of anxiety in the proper sense of the word is the most important and often the only sate. Anxiety disorder symptoms may take the form of unpleasant emotional condition, emotions of disturbing lines, cognitive, and behavioral revelations. Anxiety disorder symptoms can acquire the signs of the sympathetic overactivity or tension in skeletal muscles. Anxiety sometimes takes the form of avoidance behavior.

Anxiety disorders are described by the particularities of their manifestations and type. For instance, panic disorder is characterized by the panic attacks and panic symptoms. Panic disorder may happen with agoraphobia. In this case patients experience the fear of public places from which it may be difficult to flee. Specific phobias are fears of specific objects and situations such as the fear of heights or snakes. Social phobia is the fear of social situations such as public speaking. In obsessive-compulsive disorder doctors notice characteristic obsessions and compulsions such as unwanted thoughts and rules that determine behaviors in order to turn aside or prevent the distressing situations. Post-traumatic stress disorder develops as result of the threat to life or health. Generalized anxiety disorder entails a penetrating sense of apprehension.

Anxiety disorder symptoms and their classification

Vegetative symptoms:

  1. Reinforced heart activity or tachycardia.
  2. Sweating
  3. Tremor or shiver.
  4. Dryness in the mouth.

The symptoms concerning the chest and  stomach:

  1. Difficulties in respiration.
  2. Feeling of suffocation.
  3. Pain or discomfort in the chest.
  4. Nausea or abdominal distress, for example, burning in the stomach.

The symptoms concerning the mental condition:

  1. Feeling of dizziness, instability or faintness.
  2. Feelings that subjects are unreal (derealization) or that one’s own ego have kept away or “… at present is not here”.
  3. Fear of to lose control and fear to go mad.
  4. Fear of approaching death and fear of death.

The general symptoms:

  1. Hot flushes or chills.
  2. Numbness or pricking sensations.

Symptoms of tension:

  1. Muscular tension or pains.
  2. Anxiety and inability to relax.
  3. Feeling of nervousness or mental tension.
  4. Sensation of a lump in the throat or difficulties at swallowing.

Other nonspecific symptoms:

  1. Reinforced reaction to something unexpected or to a fright.
  2. Difficulties in concentrating the attention or “emptiness in the head” due to anxiety or nervousness.
  3. Constant irritability.
  4. Problems with falling asleep because of anxiety.

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