2023-11-06 15:44:14
06 November 2023
Fleas, bedbugs, lice… If the infestation remains synonymous with itching, sometimes you just need to talk regarding it to feel the need to scratch. How can this mechanism be explained?
Simply reading a letter from school or mentioning the subject immediately triggers the itch. Like an irrepressible impulse… Lice and other bedbugs therefore act at a distance to the point of causing psychosomatic itching.
This is in fact what was confirmed in 2019, on the airwaves of France Culture, Professor Laurent Misery, director of the national expert center on pruritus, head of the dermatology department of the Brest CHRU : “It is not systematic but certain personality types are more sensitive to it, such as empaths or hypochondriacs in particular. »
The specialist puts forward the hypothesis “an ancestral protective reaction to avoid contamination, and we also observe it in primates but also in dogs for example. It has been shown that these are the same areas of the brain that are activated as if the itch were induced by real parasites or a real skin disease. »
See a person scratching? The same mechanism
Same observation if you observe another person scratching… “A good scratcher makes ten scratches!” “, headlined Dr Alain Thillay, author of an article summary on the allergic.org site. Published in the British Journal of Dermatologyin 2011, the study in question dealt with what the authors called “visual transmission” of the itch. They then studied the behavior of healthy people or others suffering from atopic dermatitis, when faced with videos of people scratching themselves.
The result was unsurprising: patients with atopic dermatitis reported a higher intensity of itching and scratched more often while watching the itching videos. Conclusion : “itching is contagious”, as Dr Thillay then reported. If few studies have been carried out on the subject, there may well be a form of mimicry in this area. With people – more empathetic? – who would be more sensitive to it than others. This phenomenon might also constitute a means of protection. In the most extreme cases, some patients even appear convinced that they are completely infested with parasites. They scratch until they cause skin infections which themselves itch! On a psychiatric level, it is a delusion of parasitic infestation also called Ekbom syndrome.
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Source : France culture, November 7, 2019 – Papoiu AD, Wang H, Coghill RC, Chan YH, Yosipovitch G. Contagious itch in humans: a study of visual ‘transmission’ of itch in atopic dermatitis and healthy subjects. Br J Dermatol. 2011 Jun;164(6):1299-303 – Berhili N, Bout A, Hlal H, Aarab C, Aalouane R, Rammouz I. Nosographic considerations on the delirium of parasitic infestation through three clinical observations. Pan Afr Med J. 2016 Jun 9;24:130. – Allergy.org site, consulted October 31, 2023
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#Lice #bedbugs #fleas #talk #itch #news
