dark circles in 4 year old / allergic shiners, any experience?

[averagemum]

My 4 year old ds has had dark circles under his eyes for three months now, and I just wondered if anyone else had any experience of this? I'm pretty sure it is allergy related, not tiredness or anything like that, because it seemed to start one morning when he woke up with a swollen eye / circles, that then went down, but the circles - though they come and go - are now really apparent, and he just looks so unwell and run down. At the time of the swollen eye I took him to two different drs, who both dismissed them as nothing to worry about. I've made another appointment to take him back next Friday, this time armed with some articles I printed from the internet, with pictures of children that look just like him (the eyes, I mean).

But in the meantime I wondered if anyone had any experience of this? If so, what did it turn out to be, and did the circles go away?

DS has suffered from mild asthma - he had one attack aged two - and his dad is mildly asthmatic and allergic to dust and animals. Any thoughts on what I could do? Or ideas of other causes?

Thank you X

I have no magic answers but my son is the same and you have my sympathy! If your boy's like this all year round and his dad has a dust allergy then that seems a likely culprit that you could try and deal with my son definitely has a touch of hay-fever so I give him anti-histamine through the season and then I find that keeping his bedroom well humidified through the winter seems to help as well. Obviously with dust mites humidity would be counter-productive and if an anti-histamine helped at all it would have to be all year round but then if all the cleaning measures work (I'm really not sure to what extent they do). I think it's worth having a word with your GP but there will be things you can explore otherwise. The good news is that most of the time, my son looks less zombie-like than he used to

in my ds the dark circles (and "dirty" eye whites) have miraculously got better when we took him off wheat

I had my son off wheat for about six months (he has (had?) gut issues but he's autistic so that's not unusual) and it didn't make any difference to his dark circles unfortunately. Guess it all depends on what the initial underlying issue is.