I’M SUFFERING FROM ITCHY RED BUMPS ON BODY

I’m 35 and have been suffering from recurrent itchy red bumpy lesions on my body for five years. Recently, my lips and eyes have also started getting swollen. Please help.

The description and duration of your skin complaints are clearly suggesting a diagnosis of chronic recurrent urticaria. Swellings of your lips and eyelids indicate that you have also started showing signs of angioedema, which is a more severe form of urticaria.

In general, urticarias have two classifications; in the first one they are classified based on the duration of the complaints, acute urticarias, where the sufferer usually recovers within two to three months. And chronic urticarias, where the skin lesions continue to persist for more than three months. Most acute urticarias could be allergic in nature, whereas majority of chronic urticarias are largely believed to be of an auto-immune origin. The second classification divides urticarias into urticarias due to internal and external causes.

Anti-histaminic drugs alone do not have the ability to block actions of these mediators, thus mostly fail in controlling the complaints. In these cases, we need to add oral corticosteroids to increase the effectiveness of the treatment.

Most of the cases of mild to moderate angioedema do also respond well to the above suggested treatment. However, in more severe forms in which case patients also feel systemic symptoms like nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, difficulty in breathing or choking of the throat, patients are advised to immediately rush to the emergency department of the nearest hospital to get promptly treated. All urticaria sufferers need to be thoroughly investigated on wide scale standard parameters, including blood investigations, skin allergy patch testing and medically-supervised “Challenge Test” in cases where physical urticarias are the suspected diagnosis.

I have observed that most of urticaria sufferers do exhibit severe negative psychosocial impact on their lives caused by the skin complaints. A physician must address this aspect during treatment.