One thing that has always stumped me is the way Cholinergic Urticaria sometimes seem to just magically go away for some people after a few years. Most medical articles seem to suggest that cholinergic urticaria only lasts approximately 7 years in the majority of patients. It does, however, also say that some people retain the condition for as long as 20-30 years. So why does cholinergic urticaria go away for some, not others?
But why does it do this? This just absolutely stumps me. What caused it to happen in the first place, and then what is it that makes this decide to just go away? Does some event, food, or situation somehow trigger our immune system? Does something in our bodies (such as a gland) over produce a chemical that throws things out of whack, only to re-correct itself years later?
It just doesn’t make sense to me. I am sure there must be some kind of explanation, however, they obviously don’t know at this point. It seems that the first step to permanently finding a cure, is to find the cause. If they don’t fully understand why Cholinergic Urticaria develops, then they will never be able to fix it.
As I have mentioned before, I have recently been trying to get out in the sun to see if it helps at all with the hives, however, this is already becoming difficult and I may have to cancel this experiment until I get a house (or until summer finally arrives again). This past weekend I could not get out at all. It was rainy one day, and cloudy and extremely cold the other day. I did manage to sit outside for about 30 minutes yesterday, but I was freezing the whole 30 minutes of time. Today it is cold as well, and rainy, and I haven’t been able to get out today at all either. So I will try to get out as much as I can, but it looks like I may be waiting until the summer for sure.
UPDATE: 1/21/13 This is an old archived post, and I have made more recent posts regarding my new diet and how I was able to finally get my hives under control. Read more about it on my cholinergic urticaria diet page. What I essentially did was keep a journal and do several allergy elimination diets.