A A
RSS

Dealing With Separation Anxiety

Fri, Jul 30, 2010

0 Comments

It’s common for young children to have a tough time when mom or dad leaves them with someone else.

The Nemours Foundation offers these suggestions to help ease separation anxiety:

  • Try not to leave the youngster with an unfamiliar caregiver while the youngster is aged 8 months to 1 year. This is when separation anxiety most commonly begins.
  • Try not to leave your child when the youngster is very tired or hungry.
  • Practice leaving the youngster with someone new for short stints, then extend those periods.
  • Stay relaxed and calm, and be consistent in your drop-off routine. This will help your child understand that although are leaving, you will be back.
  • Always come back to get your child at the promised time.
  • Don’t allow crying or tantrums to deter you from leaving.

Side effects of anti anxiety drugs

Mon, Jun 14, 2010

0 Comments

Quite a few people encounter some concern and some worry at several times in their lives. Those with fear disorders are impacted by anxiety to such a degree that they can’t operate or live a usual stay without the need of the guide of medicines. A person of the most helpful and prevalent drug treatments for stress and anxiety disorder is diazepam.

Throughout 10% of Americans are on some style of anti-nervousness medication. The most favorite just one today is Xanax but diazepam is not really far behind. Diazepam, or Valium as most citizens generally know it, is an anti-anxiousness or anti-panic agent. It operates by effecting the release of the amino acid GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) into the brain.
GABA acts to suppresses the nerve impulses leading to a feeling of relaxation.

However a really useful and beneficial medication in the remedy of fear disorders – as properly as insomnia, muscle spasms, and seizures – everyone acquiring it for stress and anxiety must be informed of its negatives also.

Valium is habit forming and really addictive. Self medicating on your own with diazepam is a bad thought. Mainly because you can easily create a dependency on it, mainly if you bring it in significant doses around an extended period of time. Diazepam need to only be obtained underneath a doctor’s care and by no means receive even more than the prescribed dosage. Due to the fact of its addictive properties, you could possibly endure withdrawal warning signs when your doctor ultimately weans you off of the medication.

Valium is hard on the kidneys and liver. If you have cirrhosis of the liver, any style of abnormal kidney purpose, or any other medical problems with your liver you should really inform your health practitioner. Your dosage may perhaps have to be severely cut or dropped altogether. It may well be used with or devoid of food and is metabolized by the liver and excreted generally by the kidney. Dosages of Valium may well demand to be lowered in patients with abnormal kidney performance.

Valium may well also induce drowsiness and dizziness in some persons. Until you are positive how your physique will react to it, you have to stay away from driving, sports, or strenuous actions when consuming it.
A person quite striking influence of this medicine is that it accumulates in the entire body. So even if you haven’t obtained it for the whilst, you might possibly nevertheless obtain by yourself tired or sluggish with not apparent explanation why. It incredibly perfectly might possibly be the construct up of the medicine in your entire body.

Be conscious that if you bring antacids despite the fact that acquiring Valium, the antacids will act to neutralize the drug, creating it less valuable. Thus you may possibly acquire it not having the preferred calming influence on your nervous method.

Even however diazepam is quite often made use of to deal with alcohol withdrawal indicators, this really should only be performed below a doctor’s care. Generally, alcohol have to not be obtained by just about anyone on diazepam. Mixing the two could possibly trigger an epileptic attack.
Don’t consider it if you are pregnant or are breast feeding your baby unless directed to by your doctor. There is strong evidence that it can harm the fetus. In the circumstance of breast feeding, diazepam is retained in the breast milk, which means that it will be passed to the infant perhaps creating addiction.

Diazepam is an highly very helpful medication and lots of suffering from stress would have a a great deal tougher time not having it.  Just be cautious when getting it.

Anxiety disorders may boost heart attack risk

Sat, May 29, 2010

0 Comments

Adding to evidence that mental health conditions may affect heart health, a new study finds that veterans with anxiety disorders have an increased risk of heart attack.

Using medical records from nearly 97,000 U.S. veterans, researchers found that those with any of several anxiety disorders had a higher risk of suffering a heart attack over the next seven years than vets without the mental health conditions.

The findings, reported in the American Heart Journal, build on evidence linking mental health to heart health.

A number of studies have found that people with clinical depression show a higher-than-average risk of heart disease. Less research, however, has focused on anxiety disorders. And because many people with clinical anxiety also suffer from depression, it has been unclear whether anxiety itself is strongly related to heart health.

In the new study, researchers found that several anxiety disorders — including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic disorder and more generalized anxiety — were linked to heart attack risk independently of depression.

The findings show only an association between anxiety and heart attack, and do not prove cause-and-effect.

Moreover, there were only small absolute differences in heart attack rates between study participants with and without anxiety, according to the report.

Among veterans with generalized anxiety disorder, for example, 5.2 percent suffered a heart attack during the seven-year study period; that compared with 4.9 percent among vets without the disorder.

Similarly, heart attack rates among study participants with other anxiety disorders — including PTSD, panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder — all hovered around 5 percent.

But when the researchers accounted for a number of other factors related to heart attack risk, people with anxiety disorders were anywhere from 25 percent to 43 percent more likely to suffer a heart attack than those with no anxiety disorders.

Those factors included age, smoking, drinking habits and conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

As for why clinical anxiety is related to heart attack, depression symptoms may play a role, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Jeffrey F. Scherrer of the St. Louis VA Medical Center.

They found, similar to past studies, that veterans with clinical depression had a higher heart attack risk than their non-depressed counterparts. And among veterans with depression, the association between anxiety disorders and heart attack risk was weaker.

That, Scherrer and his colleagues say, suggests that depression partly accounts for the link between anxiety disorders and heart attack.

Experts suspect that depression may affect heart disease risk through direct physiological effects. Research suggests, for example, that depression boosts the activity of platelets, cells that promote blood clotting. Depression may also have effects on the immune system or the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which help regulate the heart’s response to everyday stresses.

Depression may also affect heart health in indirect ways. People with depression may, for instance, be less likely to exercise or eat well, or to stick with treatments for heart risk factors like high blood pressure.

Anxiety may affect the heart through at least some of those same pathways.

None of the veterans in this study had a known history of heart problems at the outset. Currently, the American Heart Association (AHA) does not recognize depression or anxiety as established risk factors for developing heart disease, Scherrer and his colleagues point out.

Since 2008, however, the AHA has recommended that people with existing heart disease be screened for depression, based on evidence tying depression to a poorer prognosis in heart patients.

Research has not yet shown whether treating depression and anxiety can lower the risk of developing heart disease, or improve the prognosis of people who already have it. More studies, Scherrer and his colleagues write, are needed to answer that question.

SOURCE: http://www.ahjonline.com/article/S0002-8703(10)00177-8/abstract American Heart Journal, May 2010.

Categories

Archives