Archive for July, 2008

There is a link between alcohol consumption  and increased risk of perennial allergic rhinitis, according to a recent Danish study of 5,870 young adult women.

Allergic rhinitis (AR) is an upper respiratory disorder affecting between 10% and 40% of the population worldwide, and over the last decades, the prevalence of AR has increased in westernised countries.

Alcohol consumption is part of the western lifestyle and it has been proposed that alcohol consumption may be one of the factors contributing to the rise in AR, especially because alcohol is a well-known trigger of hypersensitivity reactions and there is evidence that it influences the immune system. [Symptoms of alcohol allergy]

The study, published in the July issue of Clinical and Experimental Allergy, found that the risk increased 3% for every additional alcoholic drink per week. In contrast, the authors did not observe any increase in risk of seasonal allergic rhinitis according to alcohol intake.

The 5,870 women studied were aged 20-29 years and free of seasonal and perennial allergic rhinitis at the start of the study.

They were asked about different lifestyle habits including their general alcohol intake, measured in drinks per week (i.e. glasses of wine, bottles of beer).

Have you ever heard of sulfite allergy? Sulfites are considered as a group of sulfur-based compounds that can occur naturally.

These sulfites are also added as a preservative or enhancer by many food processing companies. They are also used as bleaching agent for certain foods like corn, potatoes, etc.

So, any person can develop sensitivity to these sulfite products at any time in their entire course of life.

Allergies caused due to this particular group of sulfur based compounds are very rare.

It has been estimated by FDA that only one in 100 individuals can become sensitive to these sulfur compounds.

Even though these sulfites are no longer used in fresh foods, it is rather possible for you to get exposed to sulfites through a variety of processed and cooked foods. They are also naturally found in the process of making beer, wine and at times in other alcoholic beverages.

Asthmatics! Stay away from sulfite compounds!

Are you an asthma sufferer? Then you must be very careful with all those products processed with sulfite. This particular group of sulfur compounds can significantly increase your asthma symptoms. It has been proved that almost 5% of all asthmatics, especially adults, are considered to be at increased risk of developing sulfite allergy.

To desensitize young children to their allergy to eggs, physicians from Greece say “let them eat cake.”

Heat modifies certain egg allergens and, in turn, allows some children with egg allergies to be “treated” by feeding them ever increasing amounts of egg baked in a cake, Dr. George N. Konstantinou and colleagues, at the University of Athens report.

They used this approach to accelerate the development of tolerance to hen’s eggs among 94 boys and girls referred to the food allergy department at the university.

After undergoing 6 months of desensitization, 90 percent of the children could tolerate egg baked in a cake, the researchers report in a preliminary, online posting by the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

“Parents should be aware that there are novel approaches for handling egg allergy,” said study co-investigator Dr. Nikolaos G. Papadopoulos.

But he cautions not to try this at home. “Children with a known food allergen should be treated under the supervision of a specialized physician,” Papadopoulos told Reuters Health.

The investigators’ treated children 12 to 48 months old. Thirty-nine had skin prick test sensitivity to hen’s eggs and 55 had been diagnosed with hen’s egg allergy after eating egg. Most of the children also had atopic eczema, a chronic scaly or itchy skin rash.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center appear to have solved at least a piece of a puzzle that has mystified physicians for years: why so many patients with asthma also suffer from GERD, or gastroesophageal reflux disease.

Clinicians first noted a relationship between the two diseases in the mid-1970s.

Since then, studies have shown that anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of patients with asthma experience some aspect of GERD.

But can GERD cause asthma, or, is it the other way around? Perhaps there is some shared mechanism at the root of both disorders causing them to arise together.

Physicians could make a case for each scenario, but until now, the exact nature of the relationship was not clear.

Working in laboratory experiments with mice, Dr. Shu Lin, an assistant professor of surgery and immunology at Duke, discovered that inhaling tiny amounts of stomach fluid that back up into the esophagus — a hallmark of GERD — produces changes in the immune system that can drive the development of asthma.

In the experiments, researchers inserted miniscule amounts of gastric fluid into the lungs of mice (mimicking the human process of micro-aspiration, or breathing in tiny amounts) over a period of eight weeks.

Do you often have itchy, running nose? Then you might be probably suffering with nasal allergy.

Whenever the nasal cavities of your nose are exposed to any kind of potential allergic triggers, you possibly experience these kinds of allergic symptoms.

Your body significantly shields you from many things like bacteria and several kinds of viruses. But when you have allergies, then the defensive work of your body becomes much harder.

Even your body naturally has the capability to protect you from several other things, which can in fact doesn’t cause any harm for others. These particular things are specifically referred as allergens or triggers of allergy.

Avoid all those Potential triggers of nasal allergies!

Pollen seeds from trees, weeds and grasses are certain seasonal allergens which can develop nasal allergies in you.

There are several other potential triggers of allergy, which can possibly present throughout the year persistently. These allergens can include dust mites, indoor and outdoor mold spores, animal dander and also insect stings. But these allergens do not bother you much, provided you do not have any kind of nasal allergies.

When it comes to allergies, both the problem and the solution are found within us.

Our immune systems respond to foreign substances with an arsenal of cells.

Some are programmed to “remember” invaders they’ve encountered in the past.

Normally, anything previously identified as harmless is allowed to pass.

Sometimes, however, the immune response goes awry, triggering an allergic reaction.

Now, researchers at NYU School of Medicine have zeroed in on a class of custom-made immune cells that block allergic reactions.

These regulatory T cells are manufactured according to instructions from a gene called Foxp3 whenever we eat or inhale a potential allergen for the first time, ensuring that the next time we encounter that substance, we will not mount an allergic response.

“We don’t become allergic to lots of things—we eat all kinds of things, we breathe all kinds of things, and what prevents us from developing allergies is that we make regulatory T cells, which specifically recognize this allergen,” says Maria A. Curotto de Lafaille, Ph.D., Associate Research Scientist at NYU Langone Medical Center.

“Every time we don’t react to something or don’t become allergic, it’s not because nothing is happening,” Dr. de Lafaille explains. “It’s because something very important is happening: We’re making these cells,”

U.S. researchers reported that a bacteria only recently revealed as a major cause of ulcers and stomach cancer may help protect children from developing asthma.

Children infected with the bacteria, called Helicobacter pylori, were much less likely to have asthma than uninfected children, they reported.

The findings suggest that absence of H. pylori may be one explanation for the increased risk of childhood asthma.

“Among teens and children ages 3 to 19 years, carriers of H. pylori were 25 percent less likely to have asthma.”

Children aged 3 to 13 were 59 percent less likely to have asthma if they also had H. pylori, they reported in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The researchers used data on more than 7,000 U.S. children from the National Health and Nutrition Survey conducted from 1999 to 2000 by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The study showed that 5.4 percent of children born in the 1990s tested positive for H. pylori.

“The disappearance of Helicobacter … is consistent with the decline of both ulcer disease and stomach cancer.

It is also consistent with the rise of asthma and esophageal diseases like GERD (gastric reflux disease) and adenocarcinoma (cancer) of the esophagus.” [Esophagus cancer]

Asthma is triggered by many reasons, but the most common one is stress. It is actually believed by many researchers that stress exacerbates many respiratory problems including asthma.

When you have asthma and stress together, you can experience short of breath, anxiousness and even at times you can feel more panicked at certain situations.

When your stress levels start to creep upward, whether it is due to over work or due to any other reasons, asthma symptoms tend to overdrive your health.

As wheezing and cough worsen your health condition, it becomes one more reason for you to worry about your respiratory conditions. In this way, asthma, stress and anxiety make a vicious circle and gradually makes your health a much concerning issue in your life.

Stress is considered as one of the most common part of your routine life, with or without asthma. That is why, it is very important to explore effective ways to manage stress associated with your asthma. So, learning various methods to de-stress your life, can help you to prevent all those disturbing asthma symptoms and you can easily avoid an asthma attack repeatedly.

According to the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, mothers who take fish oil supplements during the last trimester of their pregnancy[Pregnancy Trimester] could be reducing the risk of their child going on to develop asthma.

The research traced the children born to mothers who had taken part in a trial conducted in1990.

In this original trial, more than 500 pregnant women were randomized into three different groups for the last 10 weeks of their pregnancy.

One group was given fish oil supplements, another olive oil supplements and the third no supplements.

The aim of that trial was to see whether fish oil reduced the risk of pre-term delivery and low birth weight.

Mothers in the fish oil supplementation group increased, on average, the length of their pregnancies by 4 days and the average birth weight of their babies by about 100g.

“We wanted to see whether the effects of fish oil in very early life had any effect on the child’s risk of developing asthma as they grew up,” said Professor Sjurdur F Olsen, the lead investigator from the Maternal Nutrition Group, Statens Serum Institut in Denmark.

Delaying the introduction of cow’s milk may increase, rather than decrease, the risk that a child will develop allergies in the first 2 years of life, researchers from the Netherlands report.

They note that one of the most widely recommended allergy prevention strategies is delaying the introduction of milk and solid foods into the infant’s diet. However, there is little scientific evidence to support this advice.

To investigate, Dr. Bianca E. P. Snijders, at Maastricht University, and her colleagues analyzed data from 2558 infants.

Mothers provided information late in pregnancy and at 3, 7, 12, and 24 months after delivery regarding foods they ate and any allergy symptoms they experienced. The infants were tested for allergy symptoms at 2 years of age.

Tests showed that delaying the introduction of cow’s milk products beyond 9 months significantly increased the risk of eczema, a chronic skin condition characterized by dry patches of very itchy skin.

Delayed introduction of other food products for more than 7 months also markedly increased the risk of eczema as well as the risk of atopic dermatitis and recurrent wheeze.

Excluding infants with early symptoms of eczema and recurrent wheeze “did not essentially change our results,” Snijders’ team notes in the journal Pediatrics.