Enjoy Your Stay with Allergies and Asthma

Hotel rooms often have a lot of dust mites and molds in carpeting, mattresses and upholstered furniture. Fumes from cleaning products may also cause problems. Ask for a "green" room if available. If you are allergic to dust mites, you may want to bring your own dust-proof, zippered covers.

 

 

If you are sensitive to molds, request a sunny, dry room away from areas near indoor pools. Also, if you have allergies to any animals, ask about the hotel's pet policy, and request a room that has been pet-free.
 
Visiting family and friends in their homes can be risky if you have allergies or asthma. For instance, during the holidays, dust mites on ornaments and decorations, molds on Christmas trees, wet leaves and logs for wood-burning stoves and perfumes from scented candles can all trigger allergy or asthma symptoms.

If you have pet allergies, your trip may be more enjoyable if you avoid staying in the homes of family or friends with pets.

People with food allergies should be careful about eating home-cooked foods that may contain hidden food allergens

Reference information: http://www.allergy.hk

The information aims to provide educational purpose only. Anyone reading it should consult physician before considering treatment and should not rely on the information above.

Enjoy Your Stay with Allergies and Asthma

Hotel rooms often have a lot of dust mites and molds in carpeting, mattresses and upholstered furniture. Fumes from cleaning products may also cause problems. Ask for a "green" room if available. If you are allergic to dust mites, you may want to bring your own dust-proof, zippered covers.

 

 

If you are sensitive to molds, request a sunny, dry room away from areas near indoor pools. Also, if you have allergies to any animals, ask about the hotel's pet policy, and request a room that has been pet-free.
 
Visiting family and friends in their homes can be risky if you have allergies or asthma. For instance, during the holidays, dust mites on ornaments and decorations, molds on Christmas trees, wet leaves and logs for wood-burning stoves and perfumes from scented candles can all trigger allergy or asthma symptoms.

If you have pet allergies, your trip may be more enjoyable if you avoid staying in the homes of family or friends with pets.

People with food allergies should be careful about eating home-cooked foods that may contain hidden food allergens

Reference information: http://www.allergy.hk

The information aims to provide educational purpose only. Anyone reading it should consult physician before considering treatment and should not rely on the information above.

New Rules for Food Allergies (2)

Blood tests that measure immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies are very often misinterpreted, experts say. Having IgE antibodies to specific foods doesn't necessarily mean a person will have an allergic reaction when eating the foods. Skin-prick tests are more predictive, but they, too, measure IgE "sensitization," which may not result in an actual reaction. The report estimates that 50% to 90% of presumed allergies are not, in fact, allergies.

Still, many parents whose children have had a bad reaction to one food are anxious to know if they should avoid other foods, too, so they ask doctors to test many foods and avoid them to be safe. "

We get patients referred to us all the time who have been placed on very restrictive diets. They may be off 10 or 20 foods," says Dr. Sampson. "We go through a full evaluation and it turns out they are allergic to only one or two."

It's especially hard to pinpoint a true food allergy in young children with eczema, since they make IgE antibodies to many foods. "If you did 100 food tests, all 100 would be positive. That's what we see from patients coming in from around the country," says David Fleischer, an assistant professor of pediatrics at National Jewish Health in Denver, which specializes in allergy and respiratory diseases.

In a study published online in the Journal of Pediatrics this fall, a review of 125 children evaluated for food allergies and eczema at National Jewish in 2007 and 2008 found that over 90% of the foods they were avoiding were returned to their diets after food challenges.

The guidelines also recommend against using intradermal tests, in which a potential allergen is introduced deep under the skin, and skin-patch tests, a larger version of skin pricks, to diagnose food allergies. And they note that there is little scientific data to support a long list of other tests for allergy assessments, including hair analysis, facial thermography, which detects heat patterns and histamines in the skin, and immunoglobulin G tests, which purport to measure hypersensitivity to 100 or more foods at a time.

Melinda Beck at HealthJourna

Reference information: www.allergy.hk/, www.djreprints.com

The information aims to provide educational purpose only. Anyone reading it should consult physician before considering treatment and should not rely on the information above.

New Rules for Food Allergies (1)

Fewer Children May Be Diagnosed as Doctors Told Not to Rely Solely on Standard

Skin and Blood Tests

Parents who have eliminated foods from their children's diets based on allergy tests alone may find that some are safe to eat after all. The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases issued the first clinical guidelines for diagnosing and treating food allergies Monday, saying that blood or skin tests aren't sufficient when making a diagnosis.

An allergy should be suspected if someone has a reaction within minutes or hours of eating a food, according to the guidelines. Physicians should then take a detailed medical history, conduct a physical exam and confirm the allergy with a skin-prick test, in which tiny drops of the suspected allergen are pricked into the skin, usually in the forearm, to see if red wheals form. None of those steps is definitive by itself, the recommendations say, which will likely to lead to fewer diagnoses.

For a correct diagnosis, "it takes a combination, and in some cases an oral food challenge," in which patients are exposed to tiny amounts of the suspect food under close medical supervision, says Hugh A. Sampson, director of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and one of the authors.

The guidelines, published this week in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, are aimed at resolving wide discrepancies in diagnosing and treating food allergies among allergists, dermatologists, gastroenterologists, pulmonologists and emergency physicians, as well as pediatricians and internists. More than 30 professional organizations, federal agencies and patient groups were involved in the report, which was in the works for two years. The research company Rand Corp. contributed a review of scientific studies.

Roughly 4% of children under age 18—about three million—reported having food allergies in 2007, an 18% increase from 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Milk, eggs, peanuts, wheat, soy, fish and shellfish are the most common culprits, although more than 170 other foods have been reported to cause allergic reactions. Symptoms can range from eczema and hives to asthma, inflammation of the esophagus, diarrhea, vomiting and life-threatening anaphylaxis, in which major body systems quickly shut down.

The prevalence of food allergies has been difficult to gauge because of different standards in diagnosing and a proliferation of tests being marketed to doctors. Some tests have not been scientifically validated, experts say, and some doctors lack the expertise to interpret those that have been. The report did not state that kids were being misdiagnosed, but it did note that erroneous diagnoses could affect their nutritional well-being and quality of life.

Melinda Beck at HealthJournal

Reference information: www.allergy.hk, www.djreprints.com

The information aims to provide educational purpose only. Anyone reading it should consult physician before considering treatment and should not rely on the information above.

Allergy blood tests

Diagnosing allergy is a subject that is very commonly misunderstood. One of the commonest misunderstandings concerns the role of blood tests in managing allergies. When considering the use of medical tests, there are several pertinent questions that need to be answered.

• How sensitive is the test ? In other words, what percentage of patients with the disease will the test identify ?
• How specific is the test ? That means, what percentage of patients without the disease will the test exclude ?
• What is the positive predictive value ? That means, what percentage of patients with a positive test result really has the disease ?
• What is the negative predictive value ? That means, what percentage of patients with negative test result really does not have the disease ?

And of course, the most important question: How does the test result affect the management of the patient ?

Appropriate use of allergy blood tests

Specific IgE blood tests are useful when skin testing is impractical, such as when patients have active urticaria (hives) or other skin conditions, or if patients cannot stop antihistamine treatment. Only tests that have been validated, i.e. tests that have received FDA approval or clearance, should be used. Blood test results must be interpreted with care, and positive results should be verified by challenge testing unless there is strong clinical evidence to support the results. The level of specific IgE might be useful in monitoring the progression of food allergies, since a declining trend of food-specific IgE is a good prognostic factor for eventually outgrowing that allergy.

The most commonly used FDA-approved allergy blood tests include RAST, MAST, CAP, UniCAP and chemiluminescence assay.

Can blood tests be used to test for "food intolerance" ?

Many laboratories performing non-validated blood tests claim that these tests can be used to identify food intolerance. Such tests typically test for dozens or even hundreds of foods using crude methods such as ELISA. Food intolerance is not a diagnosis, rather an umbrella term for any condition that produces symptoms due to food ingestion. Food allergy, for example, is a form of food intolerance. Other examples include enzyme deficiencies that can lead to indigestion or malabsorption of certain nutrients, pharmacological effects of food chemicals such as caffeine etc.

Since none of these conditions, with the exception of food allergy, involve food-specific antibodies, antibody blood tests have no role in making diagnosis. Any laboratory that claims that a blood test can be used to diagnose food intolerance is committing healthcare fraud.

Reference information:  www.allergy.hk

The information aims to provide educational purpose only. Anyone reading it should consult physician before considering treatment and should not rely on the information above.