With allergy season coming in to full bloom, it’s hard to tell if your running nose is allergies or chronic sinus disease. Here are 3 key signs it’s the latter.
Your nose is running and your head is pounding. You’ve tried all your go-to cold remedies, including chicken soup, rest, and painkillers, but nothing is working.
The common cold can be persistent but it should start to subside within a few days. Once you’re past this point it’s more likely that your symptoms are either a sign of allergic rhinitis, also known as hay fever, or chronic sinus disease.
Hay fever affects over 25 million adults and children in the US and can start at any age. If you’ve never had hay fever before you might not know what it feels like. The same goes for chronic sinusitis, which shares many of the symptoms of hay fever despite their differing causes.
Read on to learn more about the symptoms of sinusitis and how to recognize if you’ve got it.
- Slow and Ongoing Symptom Development
The infection that causes chronic sinusitis, which is also called rhinosinusitis, often stems from a lingering cold you can’t shake. As such, if you have sinusitis your symptoms will be slow and ongoing, developing off the back of a cold and worsening over time.
Allergic rhinitis, in contrast, strikes after exposure to an allergen. This often means that symptoms come out of the blue and all at once. What’s more, allergic rhinitis often causes itchy, watery eyes, and an itchy throat, none of which are symptoms of sinusitis.
- Thick, Colored Mucus
The chronic nasal congestion that comes with sinusitis is the result of either a bacterial or viral infection.
As your body tries to rid itself of the infection, your snot will be thick and either yellow or green in color. Although, you’ll often need some form of prescription medication from PricePro Pharmacy to get rid of the infection completely.
Allergies make your nose run and can feel like you’re suffering from chronic congestion, but your mucus will be thin, runny, and clear. This clear snot is your body’s way of flushing the allergen from your nasal passages.
- Facial Pain
A key symptom that distinguishes chronic rhinosinusitis from hay fever or a regular cold is facial pressure. This facial pain concentrates around the sinuses and tends to feel worse if you lean forward. Although, as the pressure spreads, you may also feel pain in your cheeks, forehead, and even your teeth.
This kind of facial pain doesn’t occur with allergic rhinitis so if you feel acute pressure around your face alongside a stuffy nose and other symptoms, it’s more likely that chronic sinusitis is the cause.
Recognizing Chronic Sinus Disease
If it seems that your cold has hung around for far too long, chronic sinus disease could be the cause of your stuffy nose, sore throat, and facial pressure.
And, while some of these symptoms overlap with allergic rhinitis, thick and colored mucus, facial pain, and ongoing and slow-developing symptoms are all clear signs that you have chronic sinusitis rather than an allergy.
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