A great resource of medical articles about chronic hives

Last night when doing some more research online, I searched for "chronic urticaria pathology" and came across the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology's website. They have a bunch of medical papers in an online database, and if you search for "chronic urticaria", there are hundreds of things available. I sorted by most recent data, and found a few that were very compelling:

• One on a small test of patients with autoimmune thyroid indicators and urticaria, and treatment results with thyroid hormone: http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(12)00855-X/fulltext
• Another from a doctor writing "what the first 10,000 patients with chronic urticaria have taught me" where he goes over different "myths" about causes and treatments. He dispels myths that chronic hives are caused by stress or by food additives, and with skepticism that H. Pylori causes hives. He also goes on to say at the very end that he feels there is not enough sound data yet about treating hives with thyroid hormone for those with thyroid antibodies, but this article was published a few years before many recent ones on that topic. But he does give some nice guidelines for treatment with antihistamines: http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(08)01927-1/fulltext

Obviously, anybody reading my blog and any of these articles that I link to should discuss things with their doctor and make decisions based on their doctor's recommendations, not mine. But I do want to share resources that I stumble across and find to be valuable.

I also read the side of my allegra bottle this morning, just out of boredom, and noticed that they say not to take allegra with fruit juice because it can decrease effectiveness by up to 33-39%!!! Yikes!! My allergist and the dermatologists, neither of them told me that! And since I take it in the morning, I often take it with juice. DUH!! So maybe knowing that, it will become more effective for me.

So I think my game plan now is going to be the following:

• Go back to the allegra daily, and on days where needed, I'll do 2x/day.
• If that doesn't help after a few weeks, I will switch to try zyrtec, because some are saying it may be more effective (though it may cause drowsiness, so I may need to switch to taking it at night).
• If that still doesn't help, then I think it's on to try the thyroid hormone therapy as a trial.

One thing that I can't seem to find though are any medical articles about the duration of treatment before the hives go into remission -- other than that first article that I linked to above, sounds like for those thyroid patients, remission is directly tied to maintaining their dosages at a certain level (i.e. no cure in their case).