What are Childhood Rage Attacks?

A rage attack is a sudden change in mood that can be induced by a very mild stimulus, causing the patient to lose self-control. They are particularly common in early childhood, more common in boys than girls, and more common in urban than rural areas, with an incidence of about 5% in urban children. Clinical manifestations are behavioral abnormalities that are out of all proportion to the environmental trigger event and are uncontrollable, such as screaming, yelling, cursing, hitting, biting, kicking people around them or throwing or dropping things, or even biting one’s own arm or banging one’s head against a wall or the floor. Frequent seizures (not less than 3 times a week or more than 4 times a month), and once the seizure alone by willpower can not stop the seizure until the end of a seizure process, each seizure lasts from a few minutes to a few hours, during the seizure process, some patients lose consciousness, most of the patients are aware of the patient but can not control their own behavior, after the seizure is completely forgotten or show self-reproach, different patients may be sleepy and sleepy, reading or listening to music, etc. Different patients may have different manifestations. Different patients may have different behaviors such as sleepiness, reading books or listening to music. Diagnosis Rage episodes are not a formal diagnosis, so there is still a lack of unified diagnostic criteria, the clinical DSM-IV diagnosis of intermittent explosive mental disorder criteria for the diagnosis of rage episodes, that is: 1, multiple intermittent outbursts of irresistible aggressive impulses caused by severe aggressive or destructive behavior; 2, the degree of aggressiveness displayed during the attack and psychosocial triggers disproportionate. factors are disproportionate. Rage episodes are associated with genetic, brain dysfunction, psychosocial, and environmental factors, and are often associated with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, behavioral disorders, traumatic brain injury, oppositional defiant disorder, and sensory integration disorders. Differences Clinically, because of the intermittent abnormal mood episodes and the normalcy of the interictal period, rage seizures should be differentiated from epilepsy, especially temporal lobe epilepsy. Family history, personal history, and psychometric testing may provide some clues, and electroencephalography and videoelectroencephalography are of great diagnostic value, with clear epileptic discharges found in children with temporal lobe epilepsy. TREATMENT As mentioned earlier, rage episodes are not a single disorder but are often an accompanying symptom of a class of disorders; therefore, pharmacologic or nonpharmacologic interventions should be chosen depending on the situation. For example, for coercive disorders, paroxetine can be used for treatment; for patients with behavioral symptoms, lisperidone, lithium, valproate, olanzapine, selective 5-hydroxytryptamine reuptake inhibitors, chlorpromazine, and haloperidol may have some therapeutic effect; for patients with complex conditions that cannot be controlled by medication, neuropsychological evaluation, psychiatric counseling, and verbal interaction skills assessment are needed at the same time, and Reducing exposure and stimuli through changes in the environment, lifestyle, education, etc. can reduce the number of seizures.