Chapter 20: A Great Harvest of Entries: The Integrated Chinese-Western Therapy with Top-Tier Paper Potential

"Acute Intermittent Porphyria, or AIP, is an autosomal dominant genetic disorder. The onset age is typically between 20 and 40. It’s caused by a deficiency of uroporphyrinogen synthase in the liver. This leads to lower-than-normal levels of uroporphyrinogen, which in turn causes a disorder in heme synthesis... This ultimately leads to an increase of porphobilinogen in the urine, which converts to uroporphyrin and porphobilin when exposed to light, turning the urine red."

"Furthermore, the clinical manifestations of this disease are neurological symptoms, often presenting as acute abdominal pain. However, abdominal examinations usually yield no positive findings, making it easy to misdiagnose as a neurosis or hysteria. In some cases, because of accompanying symptoms like abdominal distension, vomiting, constipation, low-grade fever, and leukocytosis, it’s misdiagnosed as an acute abdomen, leading to surgery..."

"Because this disease is very rare in our country, there’s little related research, and therefore, very little general awareness. If I hadn’t happened to read a cutting-edge international journal, I wouldn’t have made the connection."

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