One or two consecutive sneezes is no big deal. If you’re sneezing 15 minutes it’s a huge bother and you’re definitely going to be drawing attention to yourself if you’re not at home. This is one of the unpleasant yet unavoidable realities of having allergies, and the same goes for red and itchy eyes or sometimes even getting a rash on your skin. There are other symptoms too, but can allergies cause joint and muscle pain? It doesn’t seem to make sense that they would, but let’s explore that here.  

Well, as nonsensical as it may sound it is true that having allergies may result in you having joint or muscle pain. You likely know about histamines and how they work, but they’re supposed to be taking aim at cells and not tissues in the body. Not exactly the case, and we’ll explain how that relates to can allergies cause muscle and joint pain. It has to do with inflammation, and inflammation is exactly what’s promoted by those histamines once they reach their destination. Joints can become inflamed because of allergens, so that explains that part of it. 

Muscle pain can come on a lot more suddenly than joint pain, and especially if the muscle has also been overused in the time just before an allergy attack started. As for can allergies cause joint and muscle pain, the same possibility exists for pain in muscles caused by allergen exposure. Or perhaps it is better to say body aches rather than muscle pain, because often the pain isn’t radiating from muscle tissue exclusively. It just might seem that way to the person experiencing it.  

Extremities Get it Worse  

It’s always more of a challenge for the heart to pump blood into the extremities of the body, and there’s a connection between that and can allergies cause joint and muscle pain. Any decrease in oxygenated blood supply can increase levels of inflammation in tissues, although this is much truer for muscles than it is for joints or cartilage. This is why some of the people who have muscle aches during allergy season may be getting them in forearms of calf muscles, for example.  

Histamine receptors are found all throughout the body, and so it may be that some of these messenger chemicals get sidetracked and end up in unintended locations in the body. Some of those may be more receptive to pain signals, and some people may have certain joints or muscles that are much more hyper-sensitive to this. The pain can be even worse if the person has fibromyalgia or arthritis.  

We’ll wrap up this look at can allergies cause muscle and joint pain by saying that the fix is to take an antihistamine like any other allergy sufferer. Just as the name suggests, your immune system won’t be able to product as many of them and that means less allergy inflammation causing joint and muscle pain.