Histamine Intolerance

I have a wonderful 4 year old son who just started preschool and is a fantastic bundle of energy.  He does however have a history of moderate speech delay (his was initially diagnosed as apraxia), chronic constipation and hives (or in his case urticaria pigmentosa, which is when you not only get hives but you also get "nests" of mast cells that look like freckles on the skin).

Just before he turned 3 I had been doing my research and decided to try him on an "apraxia diet."  This is basically exactly the same as the autism diet - no gluten, no casein, add in fish oils.  It worked wonders! The constipation was gone and within about 2 weeks he started talking more than he ever had before... at 3 years old we were still only at 2 word sentences and he refused to say a lot of words despite a year of speech therapy. It seemed almost too good to be true but he has been progressing steadily ever since and a few months ago reached age level for his speech. He also had almost 8 months without hives. Unfortunately I never could figure out how to stop them recurring for good...

Recently I decided to do a complete allergy work up on him and that's when he was diagnosed with urticaria pigmentosa (that is such a mouthful).  Here's a link to a more in depth description at PubMed. We were basically given the option of daily medication or a food diary to figure out the triggers.  I opted for the second - of course.  The problem with hives is that they are an auto-immune issue causing chronic inflammation, and while medication may cover this up, it's always better to find out the source of the problem to avoid long term issues.

This leads us to histamine intolerance which is the usual cause of hives.  Do you know anyone who drinks red wine and gets migraines?  Can't eat chocolate without getting itchy?This is the most obvious form of histamine intolerance.  Others, like my son, react to nearly everything with histamine, or that causes histamine to be released.  So we are going to follow a histamine restricted diet for him and then slowly reintroduce all the good foods that contain histamine (like spinach).  We will also be introducing supplements that help the body break down histamine naturally  - Quercetin, Nettle extract, Vitamin C and B6 - which increase the level of the enzyme diamine oxidase. I'll keep updating, and outline the details of the diet, as we get further into this.  Already he's had less hives and I've had less headaches - and our diet (while good, we did a lot of fermented foods and eggs) should improve too!