Could this be a case for Grey?

A 21-year-old Italian woman with no gashes or skin lesions sweats blood for between one to five minutes, usually when she is sleeping or involved in physical activity.

The condition began three years before she sought medical help for the toll it took on her mental health, wrote doctors Italian Roberto Maglie and Marzia Caproni in a report published in the latest issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal:

“Our patient had become socially isolated owing to embarrassment over the bleeding and she reported symptoms consistent with major depressive disorder and panic disorder.”

The blood would surface on her face and the palms of her hands, reports The Guardian, and, although the doctors prescribed her anti-anxiety medications, the bleeding continued.

She was eventually diagnosed with hematohidrosis, a rarely reported condition in which patients spontaneously sweat blood through unbroken skin.

They then treated her with propranolol, a heart and blood pressure medication, which reduced the bleeding but failed to eliminate it completely.

Here’s what it looked like:

Jacalyn Duffin, the Canadian medical historian and haematologist who wrote a commentary that accompanies the report, said she was initially sceptical:

“My first thought was, is this real? Could it be fake?”

However, after working her way through medical literature she managed to turn up “more than two dozen similar cases reported around the world in the past 15 years or so”:

In many of these, researchers had carefully documented the tests they had carried out to eliminate the possibility of other bleeding disorders and the evidence they had found to suggest the presence of blood in the sweat ducts.

“I came to the conclusion that it’s plausible and that it’s possible,” said Duffin.

The majority of these cases involved young women or children. Many of the reports documented that the bleeding was preceded by emotional trauma, such as witnessing violence at home or at school. In all of the patients, the condition was transient, lasting anywhere from a month to four years.

However, little else is known about the condition:

While Duffin found references of the condition stretching back to the writings of Aristotle, the condition – described in one report as a “kind of modern-day stigmata” – is often referenced alongside Christianity and the crucifixion, an association that may make it more difficult to accept, she noted.

“Blood is so pervasive – in not only religious mythology, but all mythology – that it makes people sort of think twice,” she said. “I began to wonder if one of the reasons journals don’t publish it, or are a little bit leery of it, is because it has kind of been owned by religious sources.”

In the mean time, while the young Italian stays indoors to avoid embarrassment, the doctors are working hard to figure out what could be the cause.

Seriously, though, I am sure Grey has the answer.

[source:theguardian]