A woman with a nut allergy had a severe allergic reaction after sex with her boyfriend, who had eaten Brazil nuts. Doctors concluded that semen was primarily responsible.
A 20-year-old woman from the United Kingdom had unprotected sex with her boyfriend. Shortly afterwards, her vulva and vagina began to swell and itch.
The patient developed a angioedemashe felt faint and short of breath.
As reported by , the woman then went to the hospital and was given 10 milligrams of cetirizine, an oral antihistamine that is typically used to treat hives and allergies.
The woman already knew it was allergic to Brazil nuts – dried fruit that yours boyfriend had consumed that day.
However, it was not immediately clear what triggered his allergic reaction in this case, as the partner guarantees that took a shower and brushed his teethbefore sexual intercourse.
Doctors later concluded that sex introduced allergy-triggering proteins from Brazil nuts into the woman’s body through the partner’s semen.
Later, to test their theory, doctors performed prick tests on the patient’s skin using different semen samples from her partner.
For one of the tests, doctors used a sample collected when the man had not recently eaten nuts. The other test used a sample taken about 2.5 hours after he ate Brazil nuts.
In the last test, the woman developed a skin allergywhich suggested that allergens from that nut were actually behind her severe post-coital allergic reaction.
Doctors suggested that, in the future, you should refrain from having sex with your partner if he had recently eaten Brazil nuts.
As Live Science writes, this is not an isolated case of individuals with severe allergies developing local allergic reactions after close contact. However, the culprit is usually the direct transfer of allergens through touching or kissing; and not the semen.
“As far as we know, this is the first case of a severe food allergic reaction transferred by normal vaginal intercourse”, wrote the hospital doctors in a report, cited by the same magazine.
