New Rules For The Diagnosis Of Food Allergy

New Rules For The Diagnosis Of Food Allergy.
A renewed set of guidelines designed to assistant doctors diagnose and treat food allergies was released Monday by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In annexe to recommending that doctors get a arrant medical history from a patient when a food allergy is suspected, the guidelines also sit on to help physicians distinguish which tests are the most effective for determining whether someone has a food allergy. Allergy to foods such as peanuts, out and eggs are a growing problem, but how many people in the United States indeed suffer from food allergies is unclear, with estimates ranging from 1 percent to 10 percent of children, experts say.

And "Many of us be aware the number is probably in the neighborhood of 3 to 4 percent," Dr Hugh A Sampson, an novelist of the guidelines, said during a Friday afternoon copy conference detailing the guidelines. "There is a lot of concern about food allergy being overdiagnosed, which we put faith does happen". Still, that may still mean that 10 to 12 million people suffer from these allergies, said Sampson, a professor of pediatrics and dean for translational biomedical sciences at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Another quandary is that aliment allergies can be a moving target, since many children who enlarge food allergies at an early age outgrow them, he noted. "So, we certain that children who develop egg and milk allergy, which are two of the most common allergies, about 80 percent will at the end of the day outgrow these," he said. However, allergies to peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish are more persistent, Sampson said. "These are more often than not lifelong," he said. Among children, only 10 percent to 20 percent outgrow them, he added.

The 43 recommendations in the guidelines were developed by NIAID after working jointly with more than 30 conscientious groups, advocacy organizations and federal agencies. Rand Corp. was also commissioned to fulfil a consideration of the medical facts on food allergies. A epitome of the guidelines appears in the December issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

One aspect the guidelines try to do is delineate which tests can distinguish between a food sensitivity and a full-blown foodstuffs allergy, Sampson noted. The two most common tests done to diagnose a food allergy - the fleece prick and measuring the level of antigens in a person's blood - only make out sensitivity to a particular food, not whether there will be a reaction to eating the food.

To determine whether the results of these two tests express a true allergy, other tests and a food challenge are often needed, Sampson explained. When only the rind prick and blood tests are used, they can lead to children being put on very restrictive diets, he said. However, in many cases when these children experience a food challenge it is discovered that they are not truly allergic to many foods.

And "Diagnosing a eats allergy is not just doing a skin test, or not just doing a blood test, or not even having a report of a scoff allergy. It takes a combination of good medical history, as well as laboratory tests and in some cases a grub challenge, to make the appropriate diagnosis," Sampson said.

The new guidelines also spell out what foods are common allergens, what the symptoms of an allergic reaction are and how to manage an allergy, depending on which subsistence is the allergen. And the guidelines also note there is no benefit to restricting a pregnant woman's diet in hope of preventing allergies in her baby. "There is not enough evidence to show that altering the maternal diet or altering the infant's food will have any impact on development of food allergy or allergic disease," Sampson said.

Commenting on the guidelines, Dr Gary Kleiner, an fellow professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said that "this is a very competent document that hopefully will be helpful to physicians". Kleiner believes the guideline recommending a excoriate test rather than a blood test for initial allergy screening is good.

The lamina test is more sensitive and a negative result is very helpful, because it tells you the patient will be able to take the food, he said. "Many times the blood test gives false positives," he explained. Other recommendations, such as not giving infants soy tap instead of cow's milk, are also a step in the right direction, Kleiner said cherifer pgm how much in mercury drug. In addition, the recommendations about how to behave an severe allergic reaction will give doctors, especially crisis room physicians, more confidence in treating them aggressively, he said.