Archive for the 'ALLERGY' Category

Few people know that gold and silver metals can cause allergies, or that the nickel content in gold and silver can cause jewelry allergies.

Because pure gold and silver metals are too soft to be moulded or mounted, jewelers mix nickel, zinc or copper to make it easier to produce a desired shape or form.

While zinc and copper do not harm your sensitive skin, nickel can irritate your skin and causes allergic symptoms, which means you are actually allergic to nickel metal, not the jewelry itself.

While it can affect anyone, jewelry allergy is most commonly experienced by women who see their personal jewelry as part of their daily dress and their most precious possession. Here are a few tips for you to manage jewelry allergy in an effective way:

Recognize that you have jewelry allergy

An allergic reaction usually appears soon after contact with the item, but it can take months or years of comfortable wear before surfacing.

For some, it is easy to realize and recognize that an allergy is developing. For others, though, the clues are more subtle, especially if the person hasn’t had previous episodes of the allergy.

A new article provides strong evidence that allergies are much more than just an annoying immune malfunction. They may protect against certain types of cancer.

The article, by researchers Paul Sherman, Erica Holland and Janet Shellman Sherman from Cornell University, suggests that allergy symptoms may protect against cancer by expelling foreign particles, some of which may be carcinogenic or carry absorbed carcinogens, from the organs most likely to come in with contact them.

In addition, allergies may serve as early warning devices that let people know when there are substances in the air that should be avoided.

Medical researchers have long suspected an association between allergies and cancer, but extensive study on the subject has yielded mixed, and often contradictory, results.

Many studies have found inverse associations between the two, meaning cancer patients tended to have fewer allergies in their medical history. Other studies have found positive associations, and still others found no association at all.

In an attempt to explain these contradictions, the Cornell team reexamined nearly 650 previous studies from the past five decades.

You could blame weeds, trees, and grasses if you start itching, sneezing, coughing, and wheezing this fall.

But the usual suspects aren’t the only triggers. A host of household items — candles, chemicals, stuffed animals, and spices — may be the real culprits.

“Many homes are filled with irritants, and if there’s a high enough count of an irritant, you’ll react,” says Christopher Randolph, M.D., an allergy expert and professor of pediatric immunology at Yale University.

Here, a rundown of 11 sneaky suspects — and how to stop them from bothering you.

Candles

You can’t be allergic to essential oils — which make candles smell like autumn leaves or dune grass — but their odors can inflame your nasal cavities, according to James Wedner, M.D., chief of allergy and immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine.

“People with nasal allergies have a natural increased sensitivity, so they’re likely to get a runny nose or watery eyes around candles,” he says. “To the person with the sensitive nose, it’s no different than cigarette smoke.”

Read more at CNN

According to a new report, adults and children who are referred for patch testing of allergens appear equally likely to have allergic contact dermatitis, although they tend to react to different allergens.

Skin reactions to allergens are common among children, according to the reasearch.

They can occur both on areas of the skin that come in direct contact with an allergen (contact dermatitis) and on areas that aren’t directly affected (atopic dermatitis).

Children suspected of contact dermatitis are often referred for patch testing, in which skin is exposed to various allergens affixed to a plaster tape to identify which cause a reaction.

Kathryn A. Zug, M.D., of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, N.H., and colleagues analyzed results from 391 children age 18 and younger who underwent patch testing between 2001 and 2004.

They compared results of the pediatric population to a group of 9,670 adults (age 19 and older) who were tested during the same time period.

Children and adults tested positive for at least one allergen at approximately the same rate (51.2 percent for children vs. 54.1 percent for adults).

Some cell phone users may get a skin rash in reaction to the nickel in their cell phones, a condition that the British Association of Dermatologists has dubbed “mobile phone dermatitis.”

The British Association of Dermatologists issued a news to inform doctors to be aware of the allergic reaction.

Nickel allergy is common, and people who are allergic to nickel may get a rash on their cheek or ear if they spend a lot of time talking on a cell phone containing nickel.

They might also get a rash on the fingers if they send lots of text messages, according to the association.

Not all cell phones contain nickel. Earlier this year, researchers at Brown University tested 22 wireless communication devices and found that 10 of them contained nickel.

The researchers — who included dermatologist Lionel Bercovitch, MD, of Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School — saw a pattern in which types of phones contain nickel and which don’t.

“Cell phones intended for rugged use … often have rubber coating and no surface nickel. Those with more fashionable designs often have metallic accents and are more likely to contain free nickel in their casings,” Bercovitch and colleagues told.

Inadvertent exposure to latex poses a “serious health risk to millions of Americans,” Dr. Donald H. Beezhold, chair of the Latex Allergy Committee of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) warns.

Allergic reactions to latex — which can range from a poison ivy-like rash to life-threatening anaphylaxis — are common in hospitals and other medical settings, where rubber gloves are plentiful.

But less-visible products in other environments can also pose danger, according to the AAAAI.

“Consider,” said Beezhold, “that restaurant meals are frequently prepared by cooks wearing latex gloves. In schools, the cafeteria may be a threat, but there is also potential exposure to latex in school supplies.”

Estimates of the prevalence of latex allergy vary, but the condition disproportionately affects healthcare workers and other populations frequently exposed to latex.

Allergy to proteins in natural rubber latex, which became a significant concern by the late 1980s, is believed to have originated from an increased use of latex gloves due to infection precaution policies instituted at health care facilities over the last decade, according to the academy. However, new cases of latex allergy leveled off in the 1990s.

Read more at Reuters

Do you suffer from allergies? When you or any member of your family suffers from an allergy, it is essential to consider certain preventative steps to remove the obvious sources of allergens from your house.

The flooring of your house, in particular, has a definite impact on your allergy symptoms. So you need to be extra cautious when selecting flooring for your house.

Various types of materials for floors which are suitable for allergy sufferers are available.

They provide a viable alternative to conventional carpeting. Hypoallergenic flooring materials include:

Cork flooring

This is a natural choice for people looking for a strong, comfortable, allergy-free and environmentally sustainable floor cover. Besides preventing absorption of dust, which precipitates allergy symptoms, cork flooring is free from toxic substances which are usually present in carpets and other flooring surfaces.

Wood flooring

Unlike carpets, wood flooring doesn’t attract or give animal dander, pollen, mould or dust mites a comfortable place to hide and thrive. Even when you steam carpets, it is impossible to get them completely free of allergens. In addition, getting them wet can make things worse.

There was redness and itching, some blisters and oozing. Something wasn’t right with Dr. Michael Rosenthal’s patient, a woman in her mid-50s.

The inflammation around her scalp pointed to some type of allergic reaction, but the patient wasn’t sure what had caused it.

“Have you put anything new on your hair or head?” Rosenthal asked her.

She said she had used hair dye, but had discounted the dye as a source of the problem because the symptoms didn’t arrive until more than a week after she had colored her hair. But the hair dye turned out to be the culprit.

When you use something new on your body, it might take a week or two to elicit the allergic reaction, explained Rosenthal, vice chairman of academic programs at the department of family and community medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. “Don’t think that because you’ve been using something a long time that it can’t be that.”

Talk to any physician who treats allergies, and they’ll liken their job to that of a police detective. Constantly on the hunt for the unknown offender, an allergy consult often seems more like a witness interrogation featuring a litany of probing questions.

Among children who have a parent with allergies or asthma, delivery cesarean section appears to increase the odds that they will develop allergic rhinitis and atopy — but not asthma — US researchers report.

The investigators note that to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to look at the “relationship between birth by cesarean section and atopy and allergic diseases at school age among children at high risk for atopy,” Dr. Juan C. Celedon, from Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The study involved 432 children who were followed from birth to 9 years of age. One or both parents had a history of allergies or asthma.

Physician-diagnosed asthma and allergic rhinitis in the children was assessed using caregiver interviews conducted at least twice a year. Allergy skin testing was performed in 271 children at an average age of 7.4 years.

Children born by cesarean section were 2.1-times more likely to develop atopy than their peers born by vaginal delivery, the report indicates.

Similarly, the authors found that cesarean section increased the risk of allergic rhinitis 1.8-fold. As noted, however, cesarean section did not increase the risk of asthma or wheeze.

Ragweed season is at its peak, bringing bad news for the more than 50 million Americans who suffer from allergies to the plant.

Three out of four Americans who have allergies are allergic to ragweed.

A single plant produces hundreds of millions of pollen grains that cause hay fever. Due to the grains’ light weight, they can travel up to 400 miles with the breeze.

Dr. Clifford Bassett, of Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, says ragweed allergies affect more and more people; he says that over the past three years, he has seen about 50 percent more new allergy patients.

“We’re really looking at an epidemic of new patients, children and adults alike, with allergies, as well as asthma coming in for the very first time,” Bassett told.

The planet is getting warmer, which is making weeds grow faster, causing them to produce more pollen. The increased pollen production has made allergies and asthma worse across the country.

Researchers from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology say that they have decisively linked climate change to “longer pollen seasons, greater exposure and increased disease burden for late summer weeds, such as ragweed.”