Anxiety

Anxiety is a mental health disorder characterized by feelings of fear or worry that interferes with one’s daily activities.

Types–

Broadly we can classify anxiety into two types-

A)General Anxiety disorders (GAD)-

It generally effects body and is not like any phobia in which patient is worried for any specific thing or situation.GAD is physically and mentally exhausting,it drains your energy, interferes with sleep.In GAD,Patient have constant worrying and can’t stop thinking about his problem even if he wants to.He thinks like his anxiety is uncontrollable.He can’t concentrate on his daily routine work which heavily alters his work life also. Patient have trouble in falling asleep,feels restless.Patient worry even if there is no need to worry about like a rich person is worrying continuosly about his financial conditions he is thinking that how will he manage his meal? What will he eat , he have no money but in reality the person have enough to feed his family so their is no need to worry but he can’t stop himself from worry.Sometimes people with this condition just worry,but they are unable to say what they are worried about.They complains that something bad may happen or may report that they just can’t calm themselves.

B) Special Anxiety disorders (SAD)-

There are some other anxiety disorders which are different from GAD like-

•Cardiac anxiety neurosis- In this the patient complains of heart disease but on examination we found no organic disease.But patient is always worried for his heart, on taking history we may found that patient have recently met with a person who have a serious heart problem so this have caused a great impact on mental health of the patient and that’s the reason that even if the patient don’t have any heart disease but then also he is worried for his heart disease.

•Post trauma stress disorder (PTSD)- In this condition patient experience flashback from his past accident and by thinking about that accident patient gets worried and gets tensed.Like if a person has met with an accident with his car 2yrs back and now he is fully recovered but whenever the patient decides to drive his car he experience the same incident and gets worried by thinking that what if again I met with the accident?? and finally decides not to drive his car.So this interferes with normal healthy life of the patient.He feels emotionally numb,trouble sleeping,trouble in concentrating,May sometime also experience frightening dreams that may or may not include aspects of the traumatic event.

•Hysterical neurosis- Hysteria means emotionally excess behaviour it’s symptoms includes, partial paralysis, hallucinations, nervousness and other symptoms include- Shortness of breath, Anxiety, fainting, nervousness, insomnia, irritability.

•Social phobic neurosis- This is a phobia in which the patient fears to get socialise,he feels distressed whenever he visits to a place where group of people have gathered it may be a school,office,college.This patient loves to be in alone, he is not interested in getting socialised.

•Genetic and environmental factors can cause phobias.Children who have a close relative with an anxiety disorder are at risk of developing a phobia.

•Obcessive compulsive neurosis- Obsession means a continuous and repeated thought about someone or something.In OCD patient is characterized by unreasonable thoughts and fears that lead to compulsive behaviour.It causes repeated unwanted thoughts or sensations or urge to do something over and over again i.e what we called as compulsive behaviour.Most commonly patients with OCD are seen that they have a behaviour of washing their hand repeatedly once they touch a dirty area.Sometimes patient keeps on rubbing and washing his hand that it can even lead to damage in the keratin of skin which may lead to higher risk of fungal infection.

Types of Anxiety can also be classified like-

–Neurosis– In this patient now’s that he is doing an abnormal behaviour but is unable to stop himself from doing such behaviour

–Depressive disorders– It is also an abnormal mental state in which patient becomes depressed.It is characterized by persistent depressed mood or loss of interest in activities, causing significant impairment in daily life.

–Psychosis– In this mental condition patient have abnormal behaviour but he never accepts it as in neurosis.Psychosis may occur as a result of a psychiatric illness such as schizophrenia.

This was all about anxiety,in our upcoming post we will be talking about drugs to treat anxiety i.e anxiolytic drugs.But to understand anxiolytic drugs we need to revise about neurotransmitters.

As we know brain have neurotransmitters which is responsible for maintaining normal physiology of brain so we have,

Inhibitory neurotransmitter-GABA

Excitatory neurotransmitter-Glutamate, 5HT, Ach, nor adrenaline, Histamine, Dopamine.

In Parkinsonism dopamine levels decreases and their is relative increase in Ach.

In Alzheimer disease glutamate and Ach decreases.

Contributor- Medico Anant Singh Nanda

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