What is anxiety disorder?

Anxiety disorder is a relatively common neurosis with a wide range of diseases. Its main characteristic and manifestation is anxious emotion. It is divided into chronic anxiety, that is, generalized anxiety and acute anxiety. The main manifestation is excessive tension and worry about objective things, and often restlessness, which will cause disorders in the body's autonomic nervous function, and often cause symptoms such as frequent urination, sweating, palpitations, and hand tremors.

Clinical manifestations

1. Chronic anxiety (generalized anxiety disorder)

(1) Emotional symptoms: In the absence of obvious triggers, patients often experience excessive worry, tension and fear that are inconsistent with the actual situation. This tension and fear often has no clear object or content. The patient feels that he is always in a state of nervousness, anxiety, fear, fear and anxiety.

(2) Autonomic nervous system symptoms include dizziness, chest tightness, palpitations, shortness of breath, dry mouth, frequent urination, urgency, sweating, tremors, and other physical symptoms.

(3) Motor restlessness: Feeling restless, unable to sit or lie down, irritable, and having difficulty calming down.

2. Acute anxiety (panic attack)

(1) Feeling of impending death or loss of control. In normal daily life, patients are almost the same as normal people. Once an attack occurs (some have specific triggering situations, such as closed spaces), the patient suddenly experiences extreme fear and a sense of impending death or loss of control.

(2) Symptoms of the autonomic nervous system appear simultaneously, such as chest tightness, palpitations, difficulty breathing, sweating, and trembling all over the body.

(3) The attack usually lasts from a few minutes to a few hours. The attack starts suddenly and the patient is conscious during the attack.

(4) It is very easy to misdiagnose. When an attack occurs, patients often call the "120" emergency number and go to the emergency room of the cardiology department. Although patients appear to have severe symptoms, most relevant test results are normal, so the diagnosis is often unclear. After the attack, patients are still extremely frightened and worried about their own condition. They often go to various departments of major hospitals and undergo various examinations, but no diagnosis can be made. It not only delays treatment but also causes a waste of medical resources.

Differential Diagnosis

1. Normal tension

Normal tension is different from pathological anxiety. It is an emotional response to real objective threats, and this emotional response is appropriate to the real threats.

2. Anxiety symptoms associated with physical illness

Anxiety secondary to physical illness should be diagnosed as an anxiety syndrome. Many medical diseases may cause anxiety symptoms, especially cardiovascular diseases and endocrine diseases.

3. Medication-related anxiety symptoms

Due to the widespread use of hormonal drugs, drug-induced anxiety symptoms are no longer rare. As long as the medication history is not ignored, identification is not difficult. If the diagnosis is in doubt, hormones should be reduced or stopped for observation. The use or withdrawal of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin can cause anxiety and autonomic dysfunction, and even typical panic attacks. Antipsychotics can cause anxiety.

4. Anxiety symptoms associated with mental illness

Anxiety can occur with any mental illness, and this anxious feeling is one of the symptoms of the primary mental illness.