A medical history, identifying signs and symptoms, and blood tests are often done to determine the cause of the allergies to medications.
Symptoms of Drug and Antibiotic Allergies
- Skin Reactions: Patients may often have several skin reactions if they are allergic to certain medications. These skin reactions include rashes that look like measles, photo-allergy, and erythema multiforme red. Photo-allergy is the condition wherein the skin shows scaly and itchy rashes after being exposed to the sun. Erythema multiforme red on the other hand are itchy patches on the skin that are raised and often accompanied by swelling of the face or the tongue.
- Anaphylaxis: Symptoms that can be observed when a patient goes into anaphylaxis include hive-like skin reactions, flushing, feeling warm, severe itching, difficulties in breathing, tightening in the throat, wheezing, palpitations and irregular heartbeats. The patient can also experience swelling of the feet, hands, tongue, lips, throat, and the whole face. All of the symptoms that would signal of an impending anaphylactic shock happen within hours or even minutes after ingesting first dose of medication.
- Fever that can be accompanied by chills.
- Pains or aches in the muscles and the joints. The pain that can be experienced can range from mild to severe.
- Swelling of the lymph nodes.
Allergy Reactions Due to Medicines
There are a lot of facts that can be attributed to allergy reaction to medications. These facts include the following:
- Symptoms that are associated with medicine allergy except for anaphylaxis often appear days after the first dose has been given. This is different from other kinds of allergic reactions wherein symptoms can appear right after being exposed to the allergen.
- Drug allergy reaction is caused by the immune system’s severe reaction to certain ingredients of medications that it sees as foreign and harmful. What happens here is that the body will produce antibodies to fight off these harmful and foreign ingredients or antigens which results in allergic reactions.
- Common antibiotics that can trigger allergic reactions include those that are used to manage pain like morphine and NSAIDs or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug like ibuprofen. There are also antibiotics that can cause allergies and some of the most common ones are the sulfa drugs and penicillin. Phenytoin and other anti-seizure medications can also cause mild to severe allergic reactions.
- Treating allergic reactions caused by medications would often involve taking antihistamines, histamine blockers, epinephrine, and several kinds of therapies which are often done in several sessions. There are also self-care tips that can be done at home when allergic reactions occur.