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Dermatographic urticaria - anyone else have children with this?


beaners
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Here's the wikipedia page for anyone interested.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatographic_urticaria

 

Basically, any time anything scratches my son, however lightly, he gets hives.   He is almost 3.  It peaked around this time last year, and subsided a bit over the winter. It's back again in full force. I'm thinking it may be related to some allergen, but I'm really not sure.  I mentioned it to his pediatrician last year, but she was less concerned about that compared to the fact that he spent the entire visit screaming and wasn't talking. (Which we've made huge progress addressing! Yay! And we've also uncovered more areas we need to work on.)  

 

Could anyone share their experience with this?

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Thank you so much for sharing that! I was out of town when you posted that, or I would have seen it the first time!  My son doesn't act itchy, but he does have the very pronounced reaction to anything scratching him.

 

My son didn't act terribly itchy when he was little.  Sometimes we'd be getting him ready for bed and his back and torso would just be covered, inexplicably, with hives.  The itchiness got more pronounced as he got older. He's now referring to it as "twitchy" as in, "Mom, it feels so good to not be twitchy".  

 

We're experimenting with the Zyrtec and I believe 1/2 tablet every other day is working for him. Of course, he's at camp right now, so I'm not exactly sure what he's taking ;) .  I saw him last night and with the heat, and the bugs, etc., no hives!

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My son has cholinergic urticaria and dermatographia.  We found this out after believing and testing for multiple allergies.  We're still working on ruling out an actual nut allergy one by one.  Whenever he gets hot & sweaty he develops hives.  We thought is was related to what he was eating, but the situations were all outside in the heat, or after running and playing.  It seems to be linked to some allergies, and he is allergic to Red food dye and will break out in hives from those.  He gets moderately itchy...

 

The dermatographia  bothers him most with clothes - like pants waistbands, shirts that are tight under the arms.  The hives will be 10x worse in any areas that had something touching his skin.  We use Benadryl when he has an outbreak, try to keep him cool to prevent the sweatiness which seems to cause the problem.  We don't use anything daily as a preventative. 

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Sensory issues too? Wow, my son has a combination of avoiding and seeking sensory input, and we've been trying to figure out as much as we can before he ages out of the birth-three program and needs to start over with services from the local school district. 

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When our dd was going through a bout of this, really bad for several years, she was treated with an old school antihistamine, cyproheptadine I think it was?  I don't know that it helped much.  They never found an underlying cause but she did end up having Lyme that went undiagnosed for 6 years.  I don't know if it was related or not.

It could be pretty miserable so we tried for loose clothing a lot.  Cool showers were a must.  She also got hives from heat, cold, stress and any number of other things randomly. 

At that time she was developing and I recall the first time we went bra shopping during this, after trying on a number of bras, she actually looked like she had been scourged and the lady helping us flipped out.  That really sticks out in my mind.

At this point, 6 years later, it has subsided to a large degree.  :grouphug: :grouphug:

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Sensory issues too? Wow, my son has a combination of avoiding and seeking sensory input, and we've been trying to figure out as much as we can before he ages out of the birth-three program and needs to start over with services from the local school district.

My older's sensory is all in the hyper or normal category and he gets hives from scratching as well as from allergies. So both allergies and DM.

My younger is sensory hyper to noise and light but sensory hypo to other stuff like pain.

Both my boys sensory issues have gotten better over the years.

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