Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Anxiety Attack Medications - 3 good strategies

Anxiety attacks the physiological signs that can overpower and terrorize those who experience it. Those who still do not pass the attack, as a rule, to minimize the symptoms and think that it can easily deal with. However, those who are experiencing frightening feeling dizzy, dizzy, your heart is beating hard and fast, I can confirm that it is not easy to pass. Other symptoms include nausea, sweating excessively, shaking and vomiting. People need to recognize and affirm the symptoms that they feel so they can be treated with dignity.
There are cases when people rushed to the hospital because he could not breathe and feel that they are not choked. Doctors and nurses will distinguish these symptoms as anxiety attacks and try to loosen it by putting them in a calm and relaxing environment and ask the patient to remain calm.Several procedures and methods of treatment of severe anxiety there. When the doctor and patient to come up with a treatment plan, as a rule, the fusion of psychotherapy.
Natural treatment for your anxiety attack may be the best and most effective approach for you. A natural approach to treating anxiety attack contributes three very basic activity, which aims to buy Valium and control your anxiety.
1. Physical exercise. Doing exercises to relieve tension and stress your body feels, and the dissemination of endorphins that help you feel calm and relaxed. Exercise a day for 30 minutes to an hour, not only gives you a fit and healthy body, but also minimizes the risk of anxiety attacks did not happen. It should also be accompanied by measures that promote muscle relaxation, such as yoga, meditation, massage, acupuncture and much more.Muscle relaxation calms the nerves, thereby reducing the tendency of panic.
2. Manage your time. Simple time management can really help to reduce the incident of panic attacks. Last minute orders, missed deadlines and unfinished tasks can make people suffering stress and encourage attacks. Fixing the time is right and extensive planning will help you achieve things ahead of time will save you from panic forgotten items, and missed appointments and give you a sense that control of your life. And while you're planning on-DOS, pencil in some much needed R & R time for yourself. Rest and relaxation to prevent severe anxiety did not happen in the future.
3. Surround yourself with an effective support system. Surround yourself with loved ones who can give you help, support, security, and support in the person of your predicament. Surround yourself with family and friends who constantly show you care and affection to give you the necessary support. They may be right for you when you need someone to talk to. Making your family a part of your treatment can greatly help you to buy diazepam generic you that someone is always there with you, thus reducing their fears and anxieties.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Societal Anxiety Disorder

People with venereal anxiety disorder make extreme adaptations in exuberance to avoid social situations. Learn what to do if you're one of them. Avoiding jobs that want you to give a lot of presentations is no big deal everyone does it, without delay? And skipping dinners with groups of friends because you get jumpy eating around other people is reasonable, isn’t it? Actually, avoiding parties, friends, meetings, and other common situations because you get too anxious about them is a big distribute. It's a coping mechanism for an anxiety disorder called collective anxiety disorder.
Social Anxiety Disorder: Signs and Symptoms
Common anxiety disorder is very plain, affecting around 15 million adults in the Mutual States, and its symptoms can be more abstruse than you might think. "It's one that is over not detected by patient or doctor. People contrive their lives unconsciously and consciously so as to not approve the presence of the disorder," says Charles Goodstein, MD, a clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University Langone Medical Center. "But for some people like that, it becomes an leading limitation as opposed to having some race of clear-cut malfunction. They've high water sidestepped what the real quandary is. What we see is a defense against the nervousness rather than the anxiety itself," says Dr. Goodstein. 
Venereal situations can certainly be daring-racking, but most people equitable deal with the transitory discomfort and anxiety because they satisfaction in other aspects of the interactions. But not Dick can set their anxiety aside. People with group anxiety disorder regard an overwhelming level of longing as well as self-consciousness in unchanging or even all social settings; they are day in and day out convinced that all eyes are on them, watching and waiting for them to return a mistake. 
Their concern about an upcoming happening can start weeks in ahead of. Like certain other forms of eagerness disorder, physical symptoms can expo up as well. In addition to sweating, they may go through nausea, difficulty talking, and blushing. 
"A collective situation always carries danger to some extent when the state of affairs involves people that you don't comprehend, groups around you that you can't read over adequately. Most people cut an adaptation to it, more or less," says Goodstein. But for people with popular anxiety disorder, it's shocking to think about being in a picture for which they can't treat or any unknown where they can't gage what their reply will be, according to Goodstein. 
"The dread level rises tremendously, and really often you hear that in the midway of giving a talk, for exemplification, they feel they get to walk off stage. They may commiserate with palpitations or feel that they are prosperous to sweat and that this is something they have on the agenda c trick to avoid," says Goodstein. For people with common anxiety disorder, avoiding the picture seems the sensible trend to do, rather than run the jeopardy of embarrassment. 
Social Anxiety Disorder: Causes, Diagnosis, and Treatment
The causes of popular anxiety disorder aren't pleasing understood. Being extremely protected completely childhood and adolescence may be related to some cases. Public anxiety disorder may be caused by genetics. It oftentimes occurs in conjunction with other foreboding disorders and depression, and often results in core abuse. To diagnose popular anxiety disorder, a doctor wish evaluate your symptoms and situations in which the hunger occurs. He will also look for medic symptoms of social anxiety disorganization, including increased heart estimate and blood pressure levels. 
Group anxiety disorder can be treated using treatment to help confront fears, first mentally and at the end of the day physically in real circumstances. Antidepressant and anti-concern medications may also be given to help control social anxiety disorder. Common anxiety disorder is common, but just because you repossess yourself a little shy or nervous sometimes doesn't have in view that you have the condition. However, if you start avoiding unerring situations, and find that your hunger is really affecting how you live and function, you can learn to govern your social anxiety disorder and regain rule over your life.
Anxiety does not merely consist of earthly outcomes; there are a lot of emotional ones too. Valium is in a chemical alliance of medications named benzodiazepines. It impacts chemicals in the leader that can turn imbalanced and be the buy valium online no prescription. Valium is applied in the treatment of anxiety disorders.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

National Depression Screening Day to be held Thursday

The National Depression Screening Day is to be held Thursday, October 8th in recognition of Mental Health Awareness week. Community organizations, primary care providers, some public health departments, colleges, and military installations will be offering free, anonymous depression screenings, writes PsychCentral.
A study completed last year found that depression screenings reinforce the need to seek help.
Over half of those who have depression as a possibility will seek out treatment for depression. The study was conducted by Robert Aseltine, PhD, professor of behavioral sciences and community health and director of the Institute for Public Health Research at the University of Connecticut Health Center.
He stated that those who took the online depression screening between October and December 2008 for the 2008 National Depression Screening Day, half of those sought treatment within three months of the screening. Dr. Douglas G. Jacobs, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School commented on the study, “it reinforces the effectiveness of anonymous, web-based screening programs in connecting an individual at risk for depression with treatment resources.”
There are two types of symptoms of depression, according to WebMD. These include emotional and physical symptoms. The emotional symptoms include:
o Feeling sad or empty, and hopeless or numb
o Loss of interest in things you used to enjoy (such as hobbies, etc.)
o Irritability or anxiety
o Trouble making decisions
o Feeling guilty or worthless
o Thoughts of suicide or death
The physical symptoms must be evaluated by a medical doctor in order to rule out any physical cause. It is important to note that many of these symptoms are missed by both the patient and the doctor. When a person has depression, there is a chemical imbalance in the brain that makes the perception of pain different, buy Valium and often times makes the sensation of pain worse. Treatment of depression often alleviates these symptoms, or at least helps. These symptoms include:
o Headaches
o Back pain
o Muscle aches and joint pain
o Chest pain (please have your doctor rule out any heart problems first)
o Digestive problems
o Exhaustion and fatigue
o Sleeping problems
o Change in appetite or weight
o Dizziness and or lightheadedness
The National Depression Screening Day is a very important opportunity to get a free screening, whether in your community or online. When depression is caught early, experts agree that individuals will seek out treatment. Treatment includes counseling and medication therapy. The good news is that many people can be treated effectively, they do not need to suffer.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Playing Social-Intelligence Game Reduces Stress Hormone

Stress Hormone
A video game designed by McGill University researchers to help train people to change their perception of social threats and boost their self-confidence has now been shown to reduce the production of the stress-related hormone cortisol. The new findings appear in the October issue of the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“We already knew that it was possible to design games to allow people to practise new forms of social perception, but we were surprised by the impact this had when we took the games out of the lab and into the context of people’s stressful lives,” said McGill psychology professor Mark Baldwin.
Prof. Baldwin and his team – McGill PhD graduates St phane Dandeneau and Jodene Baccus and graduate student Maya Sakellaropoulo – have been developing a suite of video games that train players in social situations to focus more on positive feedback rather than being distracted and deterred by perceived social slights or criticisms. The games are based on the emerging science of social intelligence, which has found that a significant part of daily stress comes from our social perceptions of the world.
In a 2004 study of 56 students, a standard reaction-time test showed that the game, called the Matrix, helped people shift the way they processed social information. The researchers next conducted several studies to see whether the effects of the game would translate into lower stress levels in a high-pressure context.
In one of their recent studies, they recruited 23 employees of a Montreal-based call centre to play one of their games, which involves clicking on the one smiling face among many frowning faces on a screen as quickly as possible. Through repetitive playing, the game trains the mind to orient more toward positive aspects of social life, said Prof. Baldwin.
The call-centre employees did this each workday morning for a week. They filled out daily stress and self-esteem questionnaires and had their cortisol levels tested through saliva analysis on the final day of the experiment. These tests showed an average 17-percent reduction in cortisol production compared to a control group that played a similar game but without the smiling faces. The cortisol levels were tested by Jens Pruessner of the Montreal Neurological Institute’s McConnell Brain Imaging Centre and Douglas Hospital Research Centre, a co-author of the study.
“There are many possible applications for this kind of game,” said Prof. Baldwin, “from helping people cope with the social anxiety of public speaking or meeting new people, to helping athletes concentrate more on their game rather than worrying about performing poorly.”

Friday, January 28, 2011

Depression May Cause Patients To Become Less Active

Feelings of depression could be one reason patients fail to follow their doctors’ orders on exercising and eventually become less physically active, a new research review finds.
Although past research shows that exercise improves chronic health conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes, it also shows that patients with these conditions often suffer from depression.
The new analysis evaluated 11 studies comprising some 20,000 patients. Eight studies reported that having symptoms of depression after a coronary event, such as heart attack, was a significant risk factor for developing a sedentary lifestyle or a poor adherence to an exercise regimen recommended by the patients’ doctor.
The review appears in the July/August issue of the journal General Hospital Psychiatry.
One study, for example, investigated the role of depression and anxiety in 224 heart attack survivors, at three months and 12 months after their hospitalization. Of those with anxiety and depression during hospitalization, 59 percent had a significant decrease in exercise after three months, compared with 31 percent of those who were not depressed. A year later the gap widened, with 51 percent of depressed patients exercising less compared with 26 percent of non-depressed patients.
The studies used different methods to measure depression and physical activity and there was a great difference in how they compared factors such as the patients’ health, physical activity and depression.
There are many suggested theories to explain why depression leads to a decline in activity. Babak Roshanaei-Moghaddam, M.D. of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at University of Washington in Seattle and lead author of the study offered one theory.
“We have hypothesized that there are both behavioral habits associated with depression, such as smoking and obesity, which may then limit exercise motivation and enjoyment, as well as biologic factors that can cause obesity and decrease energy level, exercise tolerance and pain threshold,” he said.
Evette Joy Ludman, Ph.D., of Seattle-based Group Health Cooperative, who had no affiliation with the study, agreed.
“Depression can indeed make people have less motivation and energy to exercise,” Ludman said. “The sad part about this is that physical activity is not only important for preventing and managing many chronic conditions; it can be very helpful for improving mood and other symptoms of depression.”

Monday, January 24, 2011

Autism Genes Tied To Glitches In Early Learning

Some cases of autism may be a failure of the young brain to wire itself properly in response to a baby’s social and physical surroundings, according to a new systematic analysis of disease genetics.
The newfound mutations may interfere with the brain’s ability to create the connections normally sculpted by a child’s early experiences, report HMS researchers and their international collaborators in the July 11 Science. The data correspond to the clinical onset and spectrum of autism symptoms, said co–first author Eric Morrow, HMS instructor in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Autism emerges in the first three years of life, during which time synapses mature in response to experience,” Morrow said. “Autism is not a single disorder. At least a significant subset appears to be various disorders—dozens if not hundreds of distinct rare diseases that end up affecting a final common pathway.”
The genetic basis of autism seems to be as varied as the severity of symptoms, which can range from oddities in social communication to severe mental retardation. The new study adds a handful of affected genes to the list and finds a common biological link among several of them.
Disconnection
Beginning around birth, the continuous dynamic give-and-take between a baby’s neurons and experiences sparks a glut of synaptic connections. At about age 1, the evolving interactions guide the pruning and tailoring of the neural networks. On that foundation, more advanced cognitive, social, and emotional skills develop most profoundly through childhood and continue to progress through life. Without that foundation, further brain development can be impaired.
“These sorts of mutations may explain why some kids appear quite normal in the first year or two of life and develop trouble during cognitive development,” said senior author Christopher A. Walsh, chief of genetics at Children’s Hospital Boston. “The more we learn about autism, the more it seems to involve cellular processes of brain plasticity.”
Three of the genes affected by the new mutations belong to a network of several hundred genes thought to be at the heart of the molecular program that orchestrates the response of synapses to life experiences, the researchers report. Of further significance, the five mutations identified in the latest study affect the predicted on–off switches of the genes, but not the genes themselves.
The possibility that genes are only disabled, not destroyed, reinforces the importance of early intervention programs, now the only treatment for autism, said developmental psychologist Janice Ware, a co-author, HMS assistant professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, and associate director of the Developmental Medicine Center at Children’s Hospital. Without intervention, autistic adults are indistinguishable from severely retarded people.
The findings also make researchers hopeful that further study will lead to effective drugs that can do as much or more than intensive early interventions to shore up essential neural networks. “We may not always be able to identify the specific gene, but we may be able to modulate the synaptic plasticity,” said Walsh, also a Howard Hughes investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Bullard professor of neurology and pediatrics at HMS.
Family Structures
The wide spectrum of clinical symptoms and the many different genetic mutations have made it difficult for scientists to use genetic tools to probe the etiology of autism and pursue potential new therapies.
For this study, Morrow, co-first author Seung-Yun Yoo, and their colleagues extended an ongoing collaboration between the Walsh lab and clinician-researcher colleagues in the Middle East in genetic studies of other developmental brain disorders, such as mental retardation and microcephaly.
As did Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, people in Middle Eastern families often have married their first cousins. Marriages between second cousins are also common and even better for such genetic studies, Walsh said. For such marriages, the risk of neurological birth defects doubles from about 1.5 percent to 3 percent—about the same extra risk, by a different mechanism, of having a child at age 40 instead of age 20—but most kids are healthy.
The structure of many families with recent shared ancestry provides statistical power to map rare, recessive genetic traits within individual pedigrees. Rare recessive genetic mutations can hide behind a good copy of a chromosome for generations and only surface in diseases when both copies of a family’s signature mutation are passed along to a child.
In this first report from the international Homozygosity Mapping Collaborative for Autism, researchers recruited families with autistic children, traced the family trees, and compared DNA of family members with and without autism. Walsh’s team later flew to sites in Turkey, Dubai, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia to confirm the diagnoses. Of the 104 families analyzed in this study, 88 families had parents who were first or second cousins, and 19 of them had two or more cases of autism.
In five of the 88 families, the researchers found large deletions clearly linked to autism. In all, the technique identified five chromosome deletions affecting at least six identifiable genes (C3orf58, NHE9, PCDH10, contactin-3 [CNTN3], RNF8, and genes encoding a cluster of cellular sodium channels). One of the genes, NHE9, was also mutated in autistic children with seizures in families having nonrelated parents from Europe and America. In six more families, the team found six more loci—a different one for each family—that they will be analyzing in more detail to find the specific mutations.
Meanwhile, co-author Michael Greenberg, director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Children’s, had independently hypothesized that autism may arise from defects in the gene network his lab discovered that transforms environmental cues into changes in synaptic connections. At a meeting in London they both attended, Walsh and Greenberg decided to compare the genes identified in the autism study to Greenberg’s list.
“We found that three of the genes identified in the autism study are on our list of genes that are controlled by experience,” said Greenberg, professor and newly appointed chair of neurobiology at HMS (see page 3). “It’s speculative, but it provides more evidence in support of autism as a disorder of experience-dependent synaptic development.”
The authors caution that the findings need to be replicated and the predicted on–off switches for the affected genes need to be confirmed. The study continues to recruit and enroll families with autistic children in the Middle East, and the researchers are analyzing data from several hundred more families.
The results reinforce the importance of early treatment and intensive special education to teach crucial skills for optimal functioning later in life, said co-author Nahit Mukaddes, head of the autism clinic at Istanbul Medical School. The average age at referral of children with symptoms of autism has dropped from 5 years old a decade ago to two and a half years old, she said. “The influence of these programs in long-term outcome has not been well established yet, she said, but “the role of early and intensive intervention in the treatment of autistic symptoms is well known.”

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Bright Light Therapy Can Help Treat Symptoms of Major Depression

Depression is common among the elderly. Late-life depression is thought to affect about 6 million Americans aged 65 and older. Antidepressants are just as effective in older adults as they are in younger people, but the drugs carry potentially serious side effects. A small clinical trial from The Netherlands suggests that bright light therapy can reduce symptoms of major depression with much fewer risks.

Light Therapy Affects Same Brain Structures as Antidepressants

Dr. Ritsaert Lieverse of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam studied 89 adults aged 60 or older who had been diagnosed with clinical or major depression. About half were randomly assigned to bright light therapy for an hour each morning for three weeks while the control group used similar light box that emitted a dim red light rather than a pale blue light. Dim red light has no known benefits or detrimental effects on humans.
A light therapy system consists of a set of bright (7500 lux) fluorescent bulbs installed in a box with a diffusing screen. It is set up on a table or desk top at which one can sit comfortably for the treatment session. Patients are instructed not to look directly at the light, but to engage in activities such as reading or writing while sitting near the box.
Previous research indicates that bright light affects the levels of some brain chemicals such as serotonin which is implicated in some forms of depression. The therapy is frequently used for patients suffering from seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression related to seasons such as winter when the days are shorter and people are exposed to less natural light.
The researchers administered the standard Hamilton Scale for depression to all study participants. This is a questionnaire used to evaluate the severity of depression.
The patients given bright light therapy made improvements over the controls comparable to the use of buy generic Valium no prescription. Those using bright light therapy also showed an increased evening level of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin and a decrease in the stress hormone cortisol.
Side effects during light therapy may include nausea, headaches, irritability and eye strain. Patients with certain eye disorders such as glaucoma or diabetic retinopathy are advised against using bright light therapy as a treatment.
Although home therapy is not recommended by many psychologists, light boxes can be purchased without a prescription for approximately $360-$500. Insurance reimbursement for the cost of the apparatus is not consistent. But if the policy covers psychiatric care or psychotherapy, it may also reimburse for clinical sessions involving light therapy.
Dr. Lieverse also warns that while light therapy is a low-cost, low-risk treatment for depressed patients who cannot tolerate antidepressants, clinical depression is a serious disorder and people with symptoms should not self-treat.