Panic Attacks
Discrete episodes of overwhelming fear with a physical surge: pounding heart, breathlessness, a conviction that something is badly wrong. Different from sustained anxiety and worth its own entry because the plausible route is different too, running through sympathetic tone and a raised resting heart rate rather than through mood.
Relationships
2 connectionsPanic Attacks increases risk of
Amygdala
The threat detector. Dense in androgen receptors, and the structure most implicated in the anger, vigilance and fear side of what these compounds do. Splitting it out of the limbic system matters because threat processing and reward processing sit in the same blob otherwise, and compounds pull them in opposite directions.
Sympathetic Tone
How hard the fight-or-flight side of the nervous system is running. Androgens raise tyrosine hydroxylase and change adrenergic receptor density, so a compound can lift this without touching mood directly. It is the shared cause behind a cluster people treat as four separate problems: a higher resting pulse, night sweats, a short fuse, and sleep that will not come.