Ira Saxena, a young girl from Colchester, England, can't stop sneezing. From the moment she wakes up, she sneezes over 10 times per minute, and the unusual condition seems to be getting worse.
Her mother is desperate to help, but doctors aren't even sure what is causing the unusual sneezing bouts.
Ira's mysterious condition kicked in one morning, three weeks ago, when Ira woke up and started sneezing. Her mother Priya says the sneezing wasn't so bad at first, but it quickly progressed to a point where the girl wasn't even able to attend school anymore. She now sneezes about 8,000 times per day, sometimes up to 10 times a minute, until she falls a sleep.
"The one blessing is she sleeps fine, it is the only time when she is not sneezing and she can sleep right through the night," her mother said.
"Ira has seen several doctors, but after ruling out the most common causes - a cold or allergies - they couldn't figure out what is causing the sneezing. The doctors are saying it is possibly an incorrect signal being sent from her brain or a tic, but nobody can be sure," Priya told The Daily Mail.
"She is not allergic to anything and has been given, steroids, antihistamines and a nasal spray, but she is just not responding to anything. No-one has seen anything like this before and they are all giving her different things, but nothing is working," she added.
The only thing that made the girl's sneezing bouts stop, apart from falling asleep, was a hypnotherapy session. However, the sneezing started again as soon as she woke up. With doctors scratching their heads trying to find an explanation for Ira's condition, her mother is now putting her hopes in homeopathy.
The longest Ira's has gone without sneezing at least once has been 25 minutes, but sometimes the bouts are so violent that she sneezes every 10 - 15 seconds. The young girl says she avoids going outside, because that's only seems to make her sneezing worse.
"This is robbing her of her life. It is so frustrating and she is being very brave," her mother said. "To be truthful, it is affecting me more than it is her, I just want her to be back to how she was before."
Cases like Ira Saxena's, although very rare, are not completely unheard of. In 2009, 12-year-old Lauren Johnson started sneezing thousands of times a day and was diagnosed by an immunologist who said her immune system had been haywired by a throat infection. Then, last year, we featured the similar story of Katelyn Thornley, from Texas, who was sneezing uncontrollably up to 12,000 times a day.
