Allergist Pooja Patel, MD: So when we talk about hives, there’s two ways to think about it. Acute urticaria or acute hives and chronic urticaria or chronic spontaneous urticaria or also known as CSU. Acute hives are literally what it sounds like. You get exposed to something and you have hives. Whether it’s food allergy, drug allergy, you know, pet allergy that you get exposed, you have hives. You treat them and they go away like it was never there before.
With chronic spontaneous urticaria, these are hives that last for more than six weeks and more commonly they occur because of an internal system change or an immune system change, not because of an outside allergen triggering it.
And that’s the biggest difference between chronic urticaria versus acute urticaria.
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