Mysterious Syndrome turns people into statues

Mysterious Syndrome turns people into statues
Mysterious Syndrome turns people into statues
Anonim

Patients with catatonia look frozen on the outside, but inside they feel fear and anxiety.

Catatonia is a disorder that seems like a relic of the past. Its symptoms are immobility, fixed gaze, withdrawal symptoms, and refusal to eat. In theory, it is a motor disorder, "paralysis of the will", anxiety syndrome, or the result of the immune system not working. Researchers are currently studying the brains of catatonic people, trying to understand what makes a person freeze. The answer has not yet been found.

But this is not some obscure Victorian relic: in any psychiatric ward, from 7% to 10% of patients suffer from it, and according to some estimates, up to 25%. Despite the prevalence of the disease, it is often misdiagnosed or simply overlooked, and for many years catatonia was considered a type of schizophrenia, and not a separate syndrome.

Unlike many psychological disorders that we do not understand, catatonia is a wonderful example of a treatable disease. Most patients improve with a dose of a benzodiazepine such as lorazepam.

But if misdiagnosed, catatonia becomes dangerous. Complete immobility leads to deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, dehydration, infections, and so on. As a result, the mortality rate reaches 35%.

This is very annoying, since about 70-80% of people are cured with benzodiazepines, sometimes in just a few.

When the catatonic people come out of a coma, they say that they were fully aware of what was happening around them, experiencing incredible fear or belief that they had died.

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