 Anaphylaxis is a panic attack by the immune system in response to certain allergens. Sudden changes in your immune system affect your nervous system, cardiovascular system, and breathing mechanism. This disorder can reduce your blood pressure and can cause swelling up your throat and tongue that hampers with breathing. Anaphylaxis can quickly lead to death if immediate medical attention is not received and if the medicine epinephrine is not given to neutralize the reaction. Luckily, only a few allergens tend to trigger this potentially disastrous reaction, and the reaction happens in only a small number of people.
The most common causes of anaphylaxis:
- Foods: nuts, some kinds of fruit, fish and sometimes spices.
- Drugs: Penicillins, anaesthetic drugs, some intravenous infusion liquids, and things injected during x-rays. Aspirin and other painkillers (called NSAIDs) can trigger very similar reactions.
- Latex: especially in rubber latex gloves, catheters, other medical products, but also in many things encountered in daily life. Sufferers are almost always health care workers, mainly nurses, or have other professional contact with latex. They may trigger anaphylaxis from bananas, avocados, kiwi fruit, figs, or other fruits and vegetables including even potatoes and tomatoes.
- Bee or wasp stings when these cause feebleness, difficult breathing, or rash or swelling of a part of the body which has not been stung.
- Unknown: Some sufferers have no cause found despite all efforts. Physicians call such unexplained attacks “idiopathic anaphylaxis”. “Idiopathic” in practice means we don't know the real cause. Death from this is very rare indeed. Nevertheless, there must be a cause or causes. Some cases are bound to be simple failure to find a cause. The explanation is not psychological in the vast majority. So in most cases this is a disease for which medical science has not yet discovered the cause. Some experts who have studied hundreds of patients with idiopathic anaphylaxis think that it is a disorder of mast cells, causing them to release histamine and chemicals with similar actions too easily.
- Exercise may hasten such reactions in some “exercise-induced anaphylaxis”, and so may exercise after food, sometimes evidently irrespective of what the food is, but in other people after specific foods. This is called “exercise-induced food-dependent anaphylaxis”.
- Medications called beta blockers used for heart disease or high blood pressure can change mild reactions from another cause into severe anaphylaxis because they block the body's main defense against anaphylaxis.
- Wrong diagnosis of anaphylaxis: nearly 10% of people sent to experts with a diagnosis of anaphylaxis have an erroneous diagnosis and have not had anaphylaxis.
If you or someone in your care develops a rash or hives after the first exposure to any of these agents, it is very important to prevent a second exposure.
That’s why you have to learn the following warning signs of anaphylaxis in yourself and others. One or two of them can occur in a condition other than anaphylaxis. But when these symptoms happen suddenly together or after exposure to a likely allergen, you should call your health care provider or your local emergency number immediately.
Symptoms of anaphylaxis:
- Breathlessness, coughing, chest tightness
- Itchy hives throughout the body
- Rapid heart rate or palpitation
- Swelling of the lips, tongue or eyes
- Giddiness
- Nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain
- Swelling of the throat, or feeling that the throat is closing up
| 
