His condition improved - he began to stand upright and speak in his natural tone of voice. The boy was treated with the antidepressant fluoxetine, along with a form of psychotherapy, and family therapy. The boy's case was very complex, so it would require a multifaceted treatment, Manevitz said. Manevitz said that, for people with phobias, it is important to identify the underlying factors of the psychiatric condition, such as anxiety, panic attacks and body image problems. Patients with this disorder may fear going into puberty because they don't identify with the physical traits they are developing, Mendoza said. He said he thought the boy might have gender dysphoria, a condition in which a person does not identify with his or her biological gender. Luis Gonzalez Mendoza, director of pediatric endocrinology at Miami Children's Hospital, agreed. "Somebody else might well diagnose this as a different problem than what the authors have," Antony said.ĭr. Other experts, he said, might have diagnosed the boy not with a phobia, but rather another psychiatric condition - for example, body dysmorphic disorder, in which people are preoccupied with a physical characteristic that they perceive to be a defect. Martin Antony, a professor of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto, said he had not personally seen a case like this boy's, and he had not ever heard of a patient being diagnosed specifically with a fear of aging. These experiences could have contributed to the development of gerascophobia, the researchers said. He was also bullied two to three times a week when he was in sixth grade. In this case, the boy experienced separation anxiety disorder (a condition in which children worry excessively when they are separated from loved ones or are in unfamiliar places) when he was 5, and he was sexually abused by a neighbor when he was 6. Alan Manevitz, a clinical psychiatrist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, who did not treat the boy. Phobias often develop from a combination of biological, psychological and environmental factors, said Dr. Just two previous cases of gerascophobia have been reported, and both cases were in adults, according to the report. The researchers there diagnosed the boy with gerascophobia - an excessive fear of aging - a phobia that does not appear to be very common.
Although the boy saw a psychologist for a year, the therapy did not help, and he was referred to treatment at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, in northern Mexico.
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