May 27, 1999
Other Illnesses
Question from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA:
My fiance has had hives for about a year. Sometimes they are very severe. She has been tested for just about everything on the planet, except for diabetes. We haven’t asked her doctor to test for diabetes because we thought that if it was a possibility that he would have tested for it. She did test positive for vasculitis and her treatment has centered around this test result with little or no improvement.
I have noticed a correlation between her eating sweets and her breakouts. Do you know of hives being a reaction to some type of sugar imbalance or any other link between diabetes and the supposed vasculitis her doctor says she has? I must add that her doctor is confused as well. He is approaching the hives as being the problem. I think they are a symptom of something simpler that the doctors have overlooked.
Answer:
Interesting. I guess it could happen that she is allergic to something in the sweets, but it sounds like it has only been around for a year. Perhaps a new artificial sweetener has been added to regular foods within the past year and may cause an allergic reaction, but I am not aware of it. If she started eating sugarfree foods in the past year, there may be an additive in one of them that is causing problems. A simple fasting plasma glucose should certainly rule out the possibility of diabetes.
LSF
