Hives or Urticaria
Have you had red patches all over your skin after eating something? If you’ve had this experience, I’m sure you’ve heard people refer to it as allergies or hives.
What Is Hives?
Hives is also known as urticaria, which refers to an outbreak of pale, red swollen bumps, welts, or patches on the skin. Hives or urticaria appears suddenly either as an effect of allergies or for some other reasons.
Hives typically causes itching, but there are rare occurrences where burning sensations or stinging is felt. Hives can appear anywhere in the body, including the face, lips, tongue, throat, and/or ears.
Hives differ in size; the smallest can be as small as a tablet or a pill and the biggest the size of a dinner plate. Hives may join together to form larger areas known as plaques.
They can last for several hours, or up to more than a few days before fading.
What Triggers Hives?
It is important to understand that hives comes out when blood plasma leaks out of small blood vessels in the skin. This occurs when the body reacts to histamine, a chemical released from specialized cells along the skin’s blood vessels. The release of histamine in the body is normally triggered as a reaction to allergens such as those found in foods, in insect stings, in sunlight exposure, or even from medicines.
Common Food Allergens
So What Are These Allergens?
The most frequent foods that cause hives are nuts, chocolate, milk, fish, eggs, tomatoes, and fresh berries. It is also proven that fresh foods cause hives more often than cooked foods.
There are also certain food additives as well as food preservatives that trigger allergies.
Drugs such as aspirin can also cause hives and angioedema. Other drugs include non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen, high blood pressure drugs (ACE inhibitors), and codeine, a popular painkiller.
Different Types of Hives
There are four types of hives: 1) Acute urticaria, 2) Chronic urticaria and angioedema, 3) Physical urticaria, and 4) Dermatographism.
Allergy Treatment
How is Hives Treated?
The best treatment for hives and angiodema, just like all other allergies, is to remove the allergens or the trigger. Doctors normally prescribe antihistamines as these provide relief from symptoms such as itchiness. Doctors recommend taking antihistamines on a regular schedule as a preventive measure.
For chronic hives, a combination of medications is generally prescribed by a doctor, so it’s best to consult one. When antihistamines don’t provide relief, oral corticosteroids may then be prescribed.
For severe hive or angioedema outbreaks, an injection of epinephrine (adrenaline) or a cortisone medication will be required; so its imperative to consult a medical practitioner.
