Is It Possible for Whole Family to Have Morgellens
What is Morgellons Disease? Is it a physical or psychological condition?
Patients are tormented by creeping, crawling sensations in their peel, merely docs say there is no evidence of bugs or parasites
Concluding yr, the U.Due south. Centers for Disease Command and Prevention (CDC) launched a study of a curious and controversial condition known as Morgellons disease, which is characterized by creeping, crawling and stinging sensations under the skin.
The projection, whose goal is to place possible risk factors and causes, was prompted by pressure from affected people, along with the advocacy groups and Congressmen that stand for them, according to CDC spokesperson Lola Russell. Many in the medical community question whether Morgellons is an infectious disease or a psychiatric disorder.
Morgellons has fatigued increasing attention since 2002, when a Pittsburgh woman named Mary Leitao launched a Spider web site describing peel sores and filamentlike structures emerging from her two-year-old son's s pare. Subsequently being inundated with east-mails from people complaining of like symptoms, Leitao founded the Morgellons Inquiry Foundation (MRF) to raise awareness and secure research funding for the baroque status. Since then, virtually fourteen,000 families take reported Morgellons cases to MRF, although the actual number may be higher, the organization says.
To larn more about Morgellons, which many patients believe is caused past parasites, we consulted Michael Cappello, a pediatrics professor and communicable diseases specialist at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
What is Morgellons disease?
It is a skin status that does non have an accepted medical definition. The name itself was given not by physicians per se—at to the lowest degree contemporary physicians—but by an advancement group. [Leitao borrowed the name from 17th-century French doctors who observed a similar condition in children.]
What are the symptoms?
Patients complain of itching and scratching sensations. They go wrapped upwards in the belief that at that place is something beneath their skin—an infectious amanuensis, such as a parasitic worm—that tin be extracted. They frequently try to pull that something out of their skin, which creates open up sores. Patients will say, "I scratched and I pulled this living affair out of my skin."
How do the patients draw these living things they believe are beneath their skin?
Often they describe them as tiny fibers. [According to the MRF, the fibers or "filaments" are "near microscopic" and may be white, blue, red or blackness. In addition to the filaments, at that place may as well be black or white sandlike granules on or in the skin.].
Take you seen any testify of these organisms?
Individuals and their physicians accept sent me pictures of these filaments and skin samples purportedly containing them, only I have never found prove of any parasites. Looking nether the microscope, the samples look similar amorphous pare, like a skin sample from a normal person might await. Some contain hair follicles. And autonomously from my personal experience, I am not aware of whatsoever evidence in the scientific literature suggesting that these patients have infectious agents crawling under their skin.
Do these patients have other signs of infectious disease?
Frequently, the patient's history and peel lesions are not consistent with what we know about infectious diseases. If, for example, a person had toxoplasmosis [a disease caused by the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, often contracted via contact with soiled kitty litter, for example], he or she would have enlarged lymph nodes and flulike illness. Or if a patient had pinworm [a mutual parasitic infection in immature children], he or she would have rectal itching. There are even parasitic infections that cause itching and peel manifestations, just none of them are consequent with the clinical presentation of Morgellons.
If at that place are no parasites, what else could cause the sores—some kind of skin disease?
To my noesis, there is no consequent feature of these skin lesions that have been linked to a dermatological diagnosis. They are self-inflicted.
And then what is wrong with these patients?
They are immigration suffering. My estimation is that the symptoms are most consistent with a psychiatric condition.
Are there other characteristics of Morgellons besides the itching symptoms and skin lesions?
Patients often become extremely invested in studying their condition. I've had people who send me photographs tell me that they have invested thousands of dollars on very sophisticated microscopes to track these so-chosen organisms living in their peel. [According to the MRF, the status also causes "joint pain, debilitating fatigue, changes in cognition, memory loss, mood disturbance and serious neurological manifestations."]
Does Morgellons affect certain demographic groups more than than others—men, women, immature, sometime, rich, poor?
Not that I am aware of.
How do you lot treat Morgellons?
Since I have not in any instance seen evidence of a parasitic infection among patients with these symptoms, I have not been able to treat them for parasitic disease. I retrieve that at its core this is a psychiatric condition, but I am not a psychiatrist and cannot prescribe psychiatric medications. I normally tell the primary care physician to consider the diagnosis of delusional parasitosis [a condition in which patients mistakenly believe they are infested with parasites].
What advice would y'all give to a person who suspects he or she might have Morgellons?
I would propose starting with a primary intendance md then consider seeing a psychiatrist if no dermatological or infectious condition tin can explain the symptoms.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/morgellons-disease-parasites-skin-psychiatric/
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