Anxiety Panic Disorder

Anxiety panic attacks are the kind of incredible feelings of extreme fear, even terror, that seem to suddenly overwhelm you out of nowhere. Most often there is no warning at all, no reason that makes any sense and no obvious threat that could provoke such an extreme anxiety attack. Often viewed as a massive overdose of the fight or flight response, you can feel as if you're about to suffer cardiac arrest or die.

Some of the symptoms you could experience are:

• Feeling dizzy or as if you're going to pass out
• A sense of loss of control of yourself
• Difficulty with breathing
• Chest pains
• Tachycardia or accelerated heart beat
• Peripheral alterations in sensation such as numbness in your fingers
• Sudden sweating or feeling cold
• And, naturally, that feeling of extreme fear

First off, you need to understand - and believe - that an anxiety panic attack disorder doesn't indicate a character flaw or some weakness. The "buck up and carry on" types are way out of touch with reality. There is now evidence that panic disorders may well be genetically based. Dr. Philibert, a professor at the College of medicine at the University of Iowa, has been developing a blood test measuring gene expression in lymphocytes which promises the possibility of a predictive differential diagnosis. It is, unhappily, a fairly expensive test, however, for those patients where it isn't clear that the proper diagnosis is panic disorder as opposed to a physical problem it could be a life saver.