What I know about histamine dates back nearly four decades. My younger sister developed her first signs of having asthma right after my mother stopped breastfeeding her. Soon, she learned that my sister was allergic (deathly allergic) to peanuts. She was also allergic to all types of other foods – eggs, chicken, legumes…and more.

In the 1960s there just wasn’t that much research out there on food allergies or the connection to asthma. And my mom didn’t have the internet. She had to rely on what local doctors told her ( in a Midwest farm town). But, like me, my parents were not ones to easily give up on finding answers. So I remember being packed into the family car for the two-day trip to Oklahoma City to the Oklahoma Allergy Clinic, one of the premiere clinics on allergies in the country.

The doctors there helped my sister, and created her very own cocktail of allergens to be injected with weekly to help her system be able to counteract these allergens. My sister needed to be retested every year, so Oklahoma City became our family vacation spot.

Fast forward 40 years and I noticed an interesting phenomenon with LuLu during her recent hospital stay. If LuLu’s meltdowns crossed the line into being dangerous to herself or others, the staff would administer the prescribed PRN medication. In this case it wasn’t something like Haldol, but rather Vistaril, which my precious internet tells me is an old-generation antihistamine. Well, besides making her sleepier than a fist full of Benedryl tablets, Vistaril seemed to make LuLu feel much better for the next day or two. And so the pattern went in the hospital that she would meltdown, get a shot and have two good days in a row afterwards.

The first week she was home, she started to complain about itching all over and she kept sneezing. This time she’s complaining of her sinuses feeling full and having a sinus headache.

So, super sleuth Mom begins to wonder what’s up with that. Is there a clue in the fact that they give her a strong anti-histamine and she feels better and has better days behaviorally?

I wade back through the many tests we’ve conducted to measure nearly every aspect of LuLu’s brain chemistry. Her most recent lab work from July that determined she did indeed have pyroluria also measures histamines, but it was within the reference range…except…

So, it was back to the internet for more research, when I ran across a site I’ve been on before, but this time, read with rapt attention on alternative approaches to mental health. Of particular interest was the section about articles from Dr. William Walsh of the Pfeiffer Center. Within those articles was a whole discussion the role of too high or too low histamine in psychiatric disorders. And guess what…LuLu was most certainly on the high range.

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