ALLERGIC REACTIONS: ANXIETY
March 25th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: AllergiesNo Comments
Few people need to have anxiety described for them. It’s that combination of uneasiness and apprehension you feel when you face uncertainty: a new job, a move to a new community, a second marriage, seeing your first child off to college and so forth.
Some degree of anxiety seems to be an unavoidable part of the human condition, given all the uncertainties of life. Certain periods of life – adolescence and middle age – are particularly fraught with anxiety.
To balance out anxiety, we turn to activities we enjoy: time with our friends; participating in hobbies, games or sports; listening to music or reading books. When the causes of anxiety are real, those antidotes usually work pretty well.
But when anxiety is chronic and free-floating – that is, not traceable to any specific cause – those antidotes don’t work. Instead, one experiences an increasing sense of panic. Or the feeling that everything inside is wound up tight. You force yourself to take deep breaths, but that doesn’t calm you down. Perhaps you fly off the handle at the least little thing, then a wave of depression sweeps in. You tend to burst into tears frequently – or feel like you’re going to. In many people, anxiety is accompanied by headaches, stomach troubles or other physical complaints.
When an anxious person goes to a doctor with his or her problem, he or she’s apt to be given a tranquillizer. Or referred to a psychologist, who spends a lot of time investigating past experiences and relationships with other people. Sometimes that works. But sometimes it doesn’t, and the person still ends up with a prescription for tranquillizers.
In a case like that, anxiety is a puzzle – with one of the pieces missing. That piece may an allergy. Working on the possibility that anxiety and allergy are sometimes linked, certain doctors have solved the puzzle of their patients’ ‘baseless’ anxiety. Ronald Finn and H. Newman Cohen, of the Royal Southern Hospital in the Department of Medicine at the University of Liverpool, worked with six people who suffered anxiety and other mental symptoms. All had failed to improve after extensive examination and prolonged medical treatment. The researchers found that coffee and tea were responsible for much of the patients’ anxiety and other psychological problems.
‘The symptoms produced by excessive coffee are probably due to caffeine,’ say Drs Finn and Cohen. ‘The symptoms, which may mimic an anxiety state, include irritability, palpitations, headache and gastrointestinal disturbances.
The implications are clear: if you’ve been overly anxious for no good reason and drink coffee every day (most coffee drinkers do), you’d be smart to give up the brew for a few weeks. Of course, that also means giving up tea, cola, chocolate and over-the-counter pain-killers, which contain either caffeine or caffeine-like compounds. It may take several days for you to completely recover from caffeine, but if that’s the cause of your apprehension, you’ll notice a dramatic drop in anxiety levels.
While Drs Finn and Cohen single out caffeine, they also feel that almost any food to which one is allergic may be the unrecognized cause of baseless anxiety.
‘Unlike conventional allergic reactions, such as a skin rash, the patient is usually unaware of the food to which he is sensitive and may even be unaware that his symptoms might be due to food intolerance,’ say Drs Finn and Cohen. ‘The offending agent is often a favorite food which is taken daily, usually in large quantities’ (Lancet).
Food may not be the only possible offender. Marshall Mandell, an allergist in Norwalk, Connecticut who has done extensive work in the field of allergy, tells of a twenty-five-year-old woman who suffered from anxiety, along with fatigue, depression, menstrual discomfort and conventional allergic problems such as hives and nasal symptoms. Medical treatment had been no help and she’d been advised to seek psychiatric help. Instead, she went to Dr. Mandell, who checked into the possibility that her problems were caused by allergy to foods and chemicals.
I learned that she reacted to freshly manufactured plastics and rubber articles, hair sprays, paints, furniture oils, fumes from gas stoves, car exhaust, chlordane insecticide and a number of foods, says Dr Mandell. ‘When she cleaned up her home environment by removing all offending household products, had her gas stove removed and the inlet pipe that supplied her house sealed off at the meter so that no gas entered her home, and went on to a Rotary Diet that eliminated all of the food to which she had reacted, her symptoms began to subside and in less than a month all of her complaints cleared up’ (DrMandell’s 5-Day Allergy Relief System).
You may not have to take as many steps as that woman did to clear up your anxiety.
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