What Are The Symptoms Of Panic Disorder?

 

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Question: What are the symptoms of panic disorder?

Answer: Panic disorder is a particularly intense and painful form of anxiety disorder. The patient, rather than experiencing general, low-level worry, butterflies in the stomach or a knot in the stomach, has the sense of something mounting and taking him or her over.

Sometimes it can really feel like the patient is having a heart attack. The patient will experience rapid heart beat, pounding heart beat, a sense of pain in the chest, a sense of impending doom. Patients will report that they feel like they're dying, they might flush, their hands might tingle, their lips might tingle or go numb.

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It's an extremely frightening experience to have a panic attack. And the problem with panic attacks is they feed on themselves. Once you've had a panic attack, and most patients will be able to tell you the first time and place they ever had one because it's such a vivid memory, they will have more just sometimes by thinking about that first panic attack that they had.

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