when did your child grow out of excema

[forevermore]

my dd is 8 months and has been suffering from this evil condition for half of her life. i have given up hope of curing, and now concentrate on keeping her comfortable.

my question is when did it all get better for you? did you one day wake up and it was gone? I fully expect her to grow out of it, as her cousins had it and her father and aunties. and they now have beutiful skin as adults.

but i wonder if there is a general trend of how long it takes for them to go regain their 'normal' skin.

just trying to find a light at the end of the tunnel really

Things change, during the crawling years on the floor ,legs and exposed skin were terrible.
once he started walking, skin only irritated where carpet and sofa were in contact.

( once we sorted out dustmite allergy things made sense)

at 3 we were lucky and removed allergy foods from diet, skin improved. To ezcema on classic areas of body, elbows, back of knees, the rest of skin was just really dry, face flared up and was linked again to weather and time of year ( tree pollen)

At 10 skin still dry still needs ezcema treatment, but disturbed nights due to skin are not part of our lives now.

William is following a pattern called the 'allergic march' which means as skin improves, symptoms to envrionmental allergies take more of a toll on his system.
So tree pollen drugs , treatments and coping skills are as time consuming , painful and frustrating as the ezcema used to be.

That said, william is a rare bod, and I dont think this will be the path that your child will follow.

At 7m DS was huggable wound, he was bleeding from his face, arms, back if the knees, weeping eczema all arounfd his body, then we found a wonderful dermatologist and the months of misery where gone within 4 days! Obviously we still had the odd episode and the treatment took a good part of the day but as he was not bleeding a weeping anymore we felt as if it was gone. 6 months afterwards we realised that it had been several days since the last time we used corticoids. We still do the cream and bath treatment (DS is now 3yrs old) but only once a day and the skin is fine, a bit dry at the end of the day but not a problem anymore.

I believe that since the day I assumed that eczema was like cold, that it couldn't be cured for good, things became much easier. I just dealt with each episode as if he had catched a cold: did as much as I could and then waited for the problem to pass. :)

Well forevermore this may not be what you want to hear but here goes.
DS1 had excema not too badly as a child, occasionally on his face but mostly just in odd patches.
It stopped all at once when he was 2. Never had it since.
DD suffered much more and started scratching at it when she had chicken pox at 15 mo. It got quite bad sporadically and then would be OK again.
Her last bad flare-up was last summer, but when we went on holiday it vanished and thank goodness has never been seen again.
She was then just 4.

Ds looks appreciably better in photos from 1 year, bathed 3 times a day, strong steroids, moved house, on probiotics and flax seed oil, after allergy testing etc.

He is now about the same but on 1 bath a day.

I'm glad to hear so many of you have experience of improvements in eczema - I'm 30 and mine is just about coming under control. Although like little william, I too have followed the allergic march, and now have eczema, asthma, hayfever and oral allergy syndrome - which means I can't eat or handle raw fruit or vegetables. This has its benefits - DH has to peel the spuds and carrots!!

I think that the point that Chandra makes is invaluable - there isn't a cure, but there are many things that can make life more bearable and if you're lucky, you're little one may grow out of it, but if not, there's always plenty of people out there with tips and hints on things that have helped!

Good luck and blessings to all sufferers.

My ds had mild to moderate eczema all over from 4 months. He would wake scratching every other night. After allergy testing I stopped eating the foods he was allergic to (I was bf) and it cleared up almost overnight. We are lucky that he is not allergic to any environment factors such as dust or pollen. He skin tested "negative" to cow's milk in November last year but if we give him any milk to drink his eczema will start to flare up again.

DD (2.6) had moderate eczema from about 4 months and was completely dairy free for her first 18 months. With her there was never any "magic bullet" and while I'm always envious of (and happy for) those people who could isolate one thing and it clear up in a matter of days, I would not recommend going down the route of spending huge amounts of time obsessionally looking for the "cure" or the sole "trigger" as there simply may not be one.

It does help to know what causes it - for us some were obvious and easy to exclude: using hypoallergenic washing powder, for example, but others were not. Also she gradually became able to tolerate dairy in different ways: hard goats cheese was better than hard cows cheese, hard cow's cheese was better than softer cheese, yoghurt was better than milk. In general - and I understand this is quite common, the "rawer" the milk the worse it affected her. Cream was the worse and had a fairly direct effect. But somethings you can't really control - there is obviously something about the water where we live as when we stayed at my mother's the eczema used to get a lot better. Central heating (hot and dry) was another trigger as is any kind of cold or infection - it is as if when her body is fighting off a cold it can't fight off the eczema as well - poor little thing looks quite dreadful when she has a cold.

Gradually from about 20 months we noticed that her skin was clearer and we needed less and less hydrocortisone for her (we only used the lightest - 0.5%, but we did need to use it twice daily). The doctor told me that 2 was about a usual age to substantially shake it off and it proved so with us: he suggested we try re-introducing dairy at 18 months - which didn't really work - and again at 2, when it largely did.

We still grease her up with a cream - Aveeno or Double Base - twice a day, and will continue to do so going forward, I suspect. I think she will alwways continue to have sensitive skin and a sensitivity to this. But other than that it is a wholly manageable state. I suspect she will also have flare-ups when she has colds etc going forward, but these are now pretty minor.

I have always had ezcema since i was 3 months old. I am now 19 years old! It hasnt really got any better unfortunatly and there doesnt seem to be a trigger as such, although it improves slightly during the summer months. Sorry not much help really. x