Italic highlighting broken after no white space

[atanasj]

I have a document where I have to provide a plural of an italicised letter, p. The p in this case is probability, and the formatting requirements are that any plural should be in the form ps. Whilst this compiles without issues, it actually ends up breaking all the highlighting for headings, citations, and stops the prettifying features (if I can call it that) where it shows the character instead of the inline code e.g., $\beta$.

This is in an Rmarkdown document, however in the main document text, which I believe this package manages syntax highlighting etc. for the non R components (apologies if I'm wrong').

Please let me know if you need any more info.