Anxiety

Click Date to read brief description	Click Short Title to read column
11/30/04	Biology May be to Blame for Panic Attacks
08/13/02	Women and Stress
06/15/98	Kava root is hot herb for anxiety
11/11/96	Anxiety it's not just a state of mind

Carol Brown is 54 now, healthy and happy. But until her early 40s, her life was one panic attack after another. The first occurred when she was 16, in an elevator. Out of the blue, said Brown, who lives in Belmont, “my heart started racing, my hands were sweating, my breathing was shallow. I thought I was going to die. I didn’t tell anybody. I thought I was losing my mind. It lasted maybe a minute, maybe a minute and a half, but it was enough to begin the pattern of events.”

Do men and women handle stress differently? Or, to put it more provocatively, do women have a built-in hormonal advantage when it comes to dealing with chronic stress? That’s the (highly loaded) question at the heart of a fascinating body of research that’s got the Net humming, with enthusiastic emails flying from woman to woman.

Traditionally, whenever the people of the South Pacific islands wanted to welcome a visitor or provide a social lubricant for communal rituals, they drank a potent potion made from the roots of an intoxicating pepper plant, kava kava. The jaw-breaking job of turning the tough root of the piper methysticum into homemade brew fell to young virgins -- male or female, depending on the island -- who spent hours chewing the root, then spitting out the masticated mush into a communal pot.

Jake McDowell, now 10 years old and a budding author, no less, was only eight when he began to think he was going crazy. It started when he heard that one of his Waltham classmates had an infection in his heart and needed a heart transplant.