Armando Perez was only three months old when he got itchy.

His mom, Alexandra Perez, says it wasn’t normal scratching that could be fixed with a cute pair of baby mittens. It was so bad that there were blood stains on his bedsheets and scabs on his little arms and legs.

At first, she thought Armando might have an allergy.

“I tried different laundry detergents and different body washes, but he was still itchy,” recalls Perez, as the now 2 1/2-year old and his big brother and little sister play with their grandpa in the downstairs of their Edmonton home.

“Then he turned yellow. I was like, ‘Well, that’s not normal.’”

She says she took the boy to see a doctor, blood tests were ordered and they came back “totally out of whack.” The doctor sent Armando to a specialist and he was admitted for a week to the city’s children’s hospital for more testing.

Perez and her husband, Walter, soon found out their son has progressive familial intraheptic cholestasis — an ultra-rare genetic liver disease that affects one in every 50,000 to 100,000 children born around the world.

Dr. Cara Mack, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, says there are 40 to 80 cases of the disease diagnosed each year in the United States. And there are six different types.

Armando has Type 2, which is caused by a gene mutation that decreases bile flow.

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