Interesting. I wonder if there are other compounds that produce similar patterns...
When Allison Fite was 16, she couldn't stop falling asleep in class. Doctors told her it was from a severe sinus infection, but it never really went away. For the next decade she struggled with infection after infection, taking antibiotics and decongestants. "Having these sinus problems and not being able to breathe was debilitating," she says.
"I was seeing a doctor in Bangkok at this point," she says. "He was like, 'This is not normal.' " But the doctor mentioned that aspirin can cause nasal polyps. This was Fite's first real clue about her illness. It's called aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease, or AERD.
It was first described in the early 1900s, says Dr. Tanya Laidlaw, an immunologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who studies the disease. It's seen in "patients who had this triad of asthma, nasal polyps and these rather idiosyncratic reactions to medications like aspirin," Laidlaw says.
Things started clicking into place. Fite's mother found one of Laidlaw's presentations on the illness online and sent it to her daughter. Fite knew she had nasal polyps and asthma, but she didn't know if she had the third symptom — a potentially life-threatening reaction to painkillers like aspirin or ibuprofen. So her doctor in Thailand decided to test her. He gave her a fifth of a pill of aspirin, just to see what would happen.
"Forty-five minutes later," Fite says, "I'm sitting in this hospital waiting room coughing, sweating, and my blood pressure spiked. And they're like 'OK, stop. Give her medicine; she has the disease.' "