Allergic to cold? Melting ice cube on the skin does cause urticaria in some says a study.

Team@CMHF

Grant Schlager sounds like a typical Minnesota kid: He loves to play outside, no matter how cold it gets, and he’s pretty excited that a slow-to-start snow    season  is finally underway.

But Grant, who turns 12 this week, has a problem: He is literally allergic to cold. It makes him break out in hives and could cause more serious reactions if he’s not careful.

So that means he can’t play in the cold for hours, the way many Minnesota kids do. ” If he is breaking out or feeling itchy, he has to go inside for a while. Swimming in cold water is risky, and so is drinking an icy soda. Just to be safe, he takes a twice-daily antihistamine and stays close to an EpiPen (a dose of epinephrine) — the same stuff kids with peanut and bee-sting allergies need to inject if they have a life-threatening reaction.

ReallyResearchers are not sure, though a new study hints at some answers. They also don’t know how common the problem is. One 1996 study from central Europe found about one in 2,000 people were affected in one year, says Joshua Milner, a researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He suspects the condition is more common.
Right now, he says, no one knows how many people with cold urticaria have the mutation or some other underlying condition.

Martha Hartz, a pediatric allergist and immunologist at Mayo, says most cold urticaria patients she sees don’t test positive for any other known disorder. But that doesn’t mean their condition isn’t serious.

Hartz says she knows of one toddler who suffered anaphylaxis, a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction, after jumping into a cold wading pool on a warm day. As a result, the child has permanent brain damage, she says.

Hartz says she diagnoses about two children a year with the condition and often has to call their schools to convince them cold allergy is real — not just an excuse to get out of recess on a cold day.

Ref: http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/medical/coldflu/story/2012-01-23/Allergic-to-cold-Its-a-real-condition-experts-say/52759906/1