Health Anxiety is an anxiety disorder which comes under the umbrella of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

This disorder often exhibits itself in behavioural patterns that involve a person becoming highly obsessed with their state of health (often physical health, though it can include mental health).

The person experience health anxiety usually believes they are displaying symptoms of illness that hint at far more malicious medical conditions or illnesses. These usually include cancer, HIV, AIDS etc.

Often, the sufferer believes that harmless symptoms in or on the body point towards the development of a more severe illness.

They tend to believe the harmless symptoms are harbingers of far more serious or severe medical conditions e.g. believing that a headache might indicate a brain tumour.

The most prevalent symptom of health anxiety is obsessively checking the body for signs of illness, often with a mind to self-diagnose a more serious condition. This can also include sufferer's believing that they are developing mental illnesses.

Sufferers tend to seek the opinions of more than one medical expert in order to obtain a diagnosis for the condition they imagine they already possess.

Sometimes, someone experiencing health anxiety will even seek to have several tests done – which can extend to surgery – in order to find out what they believe is wrong with them.

Usually doctors are unable to provide a diagnosis for the patient, telling them the situation is medically unexplainable. This tends to perpetuate the health anxiety symptoms and the sufferer's state of worry increases.

Conversely, some people suffering from health anxiety might choose to forgo a medical opinion and even get to the stage where they avoid people altogether.

This can develop into a more extreme case of agoraphobia.

Further symptoms of health anxiety involve the sufferer over-researching medical conditions, symptoms and scenarios and trying to match their condition to the ones they've read up on or seen on television.

They tend to obsess and fixate on self-checking; consistently looking for anything that might be wrong with their physical or mental self.

This obsessive self-checking often exacerbates levels of physical anxiety, which usually result in palpitations, chest pain, dizziness etc.

This then increases the sufferer's anxiety and belief that they are experiencing the onset of further medical problems.

Health anxiety can affect people of any age and any gender and can develop at any stage in life. It may last a long while or there may be periods where the sufferer is symptom-free.