Panic attacks - symptoms, causes, signs and treatments for adults

Panic attack itself is not a disease, but a syndrome, a complex of symptoms accompanying the course of another disorder or developing on its own. This condition is always heavily experienced by the patient, although it is not physically threatening or life-threatening. It makes its debut at the age of 20-30 years. It appears suddenly after having gone through psycho-emotional stress, or against a background of, it would seem, complete well-being. Lasts on the average 15-30 minutes, less frequently - up to one hour. Symptoms of panic attacks in men and women are similar, the main ones are:

• a pronounced feeling of anxiety, fear of death, going crazy, falling ill with a serious illness, suffocating, doing the wrong thing;
• Feeling of a lump in the throat, incompleteness, difficulty in breathing, shortness of breath;
• heartbeat;
• increase in blood pressure;
• discomfort, pain in the heart area or other unpleasant bodily sensations (numbness of body parts, crawling goosebumps);
• trembling in the body;
• headache, dizziness;
• sweating;
• weakness.

A rarer sign of a panic attack is derealization. It is a feeling of the world being changed, as if the patient is looking at it from the outside, and it seems to him that the world has become somehow different, distorted.

The acute symptoms and signs of a panic attack, even in the absence of treatment, gradually regress, leaving behind a feeling of weakness, brokenness, some discomfort and anxiety.

In panic disorder outside of such attacks, the patient's condition is satisfactory, he or she experiences practically no unpleasant symptoms, only some anxiety associated with waiting for the next attack. If between panic episodes the patient notes anxiety, irritability, mood swings, sleep disturbances, there is probably another neurotic disorder which includes panic attacks. All these points will be clarified by the doctor during the consultation.