Has anyone looked in to the histamine connection?

[MomWithOCDSon]

We recently had some blood testing done on my ds, and his Immunoglobulin IgE came back very high: @455ku/L (norm would be 224 or below according to this lab). His pediatrician thinks this indicates allergy and possibly high histamine, but I found some conflicting stuff online. This study found that high IgE can indicate low histamine:

 

http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1987/pdf/1987-v02n04-p219.pdf

 

My son is an allergic/eczema/gets-sick-more-than-the-rest-of-us kid, so I was tending to think of him as high histamine, but wondering. . . . .

 

When my DS was tested a couple of years ago, all his immune markers (including IgE) were in the normal range. He gets classically "sick" less than most other kids his age and was also not classically symptomatic with strep. He is highly allergic in terms of environmental triggers -- pollen, dust, mold, cat dander -- and frequently suffers from eczema.

 

In the past, his eczema would precede a ramp-up of anxiety and OCD behaviors, so it was one of our first signs that we needed to get on top of a potential PANDAS exacerbation.

 

Thanks to some ideas here, though, we started giving him Pepcid (H2 blocker) once a day about 6 months ago now; his eczema seems to be a thing of the past, and his bouts of anxiety have abated significantly, as well. Since there's a gut-brain connection with in so many other ways (serontonin, for example), this antihistamine gut-brain connection makes sense to us, even though the full explanation is well out of our league.

 

I was under the impression, however, that not all these "antacid/heartburn" rememdies, i.e., Pepcid, Prilosec, etc. were the same. My understanding is that while some, like Pepcid, are literally H2 blockers, others, like Prilosec, work via a different mechanism -- aka, proton pump inhibitors -- so perhaps their impact on histamine anywhere in the body is going to be different?

 

H2 Blockers vs. Proton Pump Inhibitors

[nicklemama]

Don't know about the brain histamine but but DS's IgG subclass 4 was high when checked about 1.5yrs ago by Dr T. We found out recently that he has significant allergies and he's on an antihistamine (claritin) and he's doing really well. I was told by Dr T back than that IgG subclclass 4 being high related to allergies.