TREATING CHEMICAL SENSITIVITY: FORMALDEHYDE
April 20th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: AllergiesNo Comments
The main sources of formaldehyde in the home are cavity-wall insulation and chipboard. There is little one can do about the former. The latter can be replaced or ’sealed in’ with gloss paint – get someone else to do this for you if you can, and stay out of the way until the smell of paint has dispersed. If you have cavity wall insulation as well, the only way you can test for its effects is to go away for a while, to a house without sources of formaldehyde. Simple stone cottages with solid walls are a good bet. Plush modem hotels are likely to be oozing formaldehyde vapour.
Other sources of formaldehyde include foam rubber, new textiles, paper (including newsprint), photographs, leather luggage, antiperspirants, some cosmetics and shampoos, plywood and blockboard. It is only worth eliminating these if you have strong reasons to suspect formaldehyde.
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SKIN ALLERGY: PINNING DOWN JEWELLERY ALLERGY
March 25th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: AllergiesNo Comments
Speaking of nickel, that metal is to blame for more skin allergies than any other metal – probably because it’s so widely used. Everything from zips and poppers to coins and costume jewellery contains some nickel.
What’s more, the salt in perspiration dissolves nickel. People who wear costume jewellery with no problem during the winter often find that in summer, the same jewellery will make them itch and feel prickly within just fifteen or twenty minutes. An hour or so later, they break out. Or they break out wherever pressure is great – where tight suspenders rub against thighs, for example. (Incidentally, tight clothing in general tends to be more troublesome – another good reason to keep your weight down.)
Nickel molecules also tend to affix themselves to skin cells, prolonging symptoms even after you’ve removed the article in question.
One in every ten women is allergic to nickel, and most of them, says Dr Schorr, are young women who have had their ears pierced and subsequently developed nickel allergy. The problem begins, obviously enough, on the earlobes, and later resurfaces on the wrist, neck or abdomen due to contact with nickel in watches, bracelets, necklaces, buckles and clips.
Nickel-sensitive people resort to various schemes to put a barrier between their skin and nickel. Earring fasteners can also be coated with clear nail lacquer (if you can wear it safely). You can wear powder underneath your necklace and clasp bracelets. And buy spectacle frames of plastic or with plastic sleeves on the stems.
If you’re going to have your ears pierced, you can avoid nickel allergy by having it done by a doctor, and requesting that he or she use a stainless steel needle. Wear only stainless steel, stud earrings for the first three weeks, until the hole heals over completely. After that, you can wear any earrings safely, says Dr Fisher (Journal of the American Medical Association).
Stainless steel is non-allergenic, even if it contains nickel, because the nickel is bound in so firmly that even sweat cannot free up the metal. Certain other metals – especially copper and silver – corrode readily and can occasionally cause trouble, especially when dampened by perspiration.
Gold is far less apt to cause allergy than other decorative metals. Some people can wear no jewellery unless it’s 24-carat (100 per cent) gold. But even ‘pure’ gold may be contaminated with traces of nickel or other metals. And sulphur and other chemicals in smog can tarnish gold. When a tarnished gold ring is slipped on the finger or a bracelet is placed on the arm, the tarnish may cause a reaction.
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ALLERGIC REACTIONS: KIDNEY PROBLEMS
March 25th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: AllergiesNo Comments
Kidneys fail when the tiny capillaries that carry blood within the kidneys for purification become damaged (nephrosis). As the filtering process slows down, blood and proteins pass into the urine. Water backs up (a condition known as ‘oedema’), and the body begins to swell.
Kidney damage affects children and young adults more than older people. Most often, it’s caused by inflammation following an infection such as scarlet fever. But in a small number of people, kidney damage is tied to allergies, especially if the affected person has asthma, eczema or another form of allergy.
Douglas Sandberg, professor of pediatrics at the University of Miami School of Medicine, has encountered many children whose kidney problems were linked to allergies. These problems responded to restriction of certain foods or airborne allergens. In the book, Food Allergies: New Perspectives, he reports a number of cases.
• Out of one group of nineteen children with kidney disorders, seventeen were allergic to one or more foods. Eating those foods increased the amount of protein in their urine – a major feature of kidney malfunction. Several of the children improved significantly when their food allergies were treated.
‘A Rotary Diet alone produced good results in two patients,’ says Dr Sandberg. In eleven other children, therapy also included allergy injections, which helped them to tolerate hidden foods such as milk, wheat and corn.
• Three children, ages thirteen to fifteen, were allergic to several foods. (All had asthma and one had eczema.) The kidneys of two of these children healed when milk was avoided.
The third continued to suffer relapses. Dr Sandberg speculates that she may have had an undetected viral infection or chemical allergy.
• A five-year-old boy had severe kidney inflammation, with abdominal pain and blood in his urine. To test him for allergies, he was put on a gluten-free Rotary Diet, with no one food eaten more often than once in four days. Individual foods were then tried. Tests showed the kidneys got worse when he ate milk, eggs and lima beans. Eventually, Dr Sandberg found that the boy was also allergic to a number of other foods and some chemicals, such as household cleaning solutions and insecticides, and that those allergens aggravated his kidney condition.
• A five-year-old girl was tested and found to be allergic to cow’s milk. Blood, urine and kidney function tests showed that her kidneys got worse after she drank cow’s milk and healed when it was avoided. Oedema, or water retention, also increased visibly when she drank milk and decreased when she didn’t drink it.
‘The patient was also . . . sensitive to other foods, as well as to some airborne allergens, and has improved on a limited diet and food and inhalant injection therapy,’ says Dr Sandberg.
According to Dr Sandberg, those cases strongly suggest that food allergy is one of the many causes of kidney malfunction, and that inhalant allergies also play a role.
‘It would appear that these patients have an unusual degree of sensitivity to environmental agents,’ says Dr Sandberg. Allergy, he believes, may trigger a chain of events that produces different forms of kidney damage in different individuals.
Dr Sandberg’s work follows in the wake of several studies by Japanese doctors who found that certain foods aggravated proteinuria (protein in the urine) in many people with kidney inflammation. In one group of thirty-six such people, foods that provoked protein loss, in order of frequency, were: milk, eggs, soya beans, pork, red beans and tuna. Invariably, a single feeding of a food was enough to provoke trouble – which disappeared when the offending food was avoided.
Bedwetting, painful urination and a frequent urge to urinate have also been associated with food, chemical or pollen exposures, according to Doris J. Rapp, a pediatrician and allergist in Buffalo, New York.
Kidney problems are not the sort of thing you can diagnose yourself. If you have bloody or wine-colored urine, with back pain, headaches, a rundown feeling and a slight fever, see your doctor immediately. And don’t be afraid to raise the question of allergies. While certain forms of kidney trouble are associated with reactions to pollen, drugs, toxins or insect bites, reactions to foods have only recently been recognized.
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ALLERGIC REACTIONS: EAR INFLAMMATION AND HEARING LOSS
March 25th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: AllergiesNo Comments
Inflammation inside the ear – frequent cause of earaches and periodic hearing loss – is often the result of an allergic reaction in the nose or throat. Airborne allergens – pollen, dust and the like – are the most common offenders, and the problem shows up most frequently in children with hay fever or asthma. But adults can be affected, too.
In one study, eight people with hay fever developed ear trouble after breathing ragweed or timothy grass pollen, common allergens to which they were allergic. (Their hay fever flared up at the same time.) But when they breathed pine pollen – to which none of them were allergic – their ears were fine.
In another study eleven out of twenty-five people with hay fever had ear trouble after exposure to rye grass pollen (Wellcome Trends).
Ear inflammation can also be caused by sinusitis, infections, enlarged tonsils or adenoids, nasal polyps or congenital defects. But, in any of those conditions, allergy can aggravate ear inflammation.
Decongestants and antihistamines can temporarily clear up an allergic ear inflammation. But unless all allergic factors are recognized and avoided, the problem may persist – and eventually cause permanent hearing loss. In fact, uncontrolled ear inflammation is the most common cause of deafness in children.
If ear inflammation is caused by an infection, your doctor may prescribe antibiotic ear drops. But if you’re allergic to antibiotics, the problem is likely to persist – or get a lot worse. A study in Britain found that out of forty adults who had ear inflammation for longer than a year, fourteen were allergic to one or more antibiotics in the ear drops they were using. Neomycin, framycetin, gentamycin and ciolquinol – four commonly used antibiotics – were to blame. The doctors reporting these cases recommend that people with persistent ear inflammation should be tested for possible allergy to antibiotics (Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine).
Medicated ear drops can also cause contact allergy on the outer ear. So can earrings, spectacle stems and perfumes.
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ALLERGIC REACTIONS: ANXIETY
March 25th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: AllergiesNo Comments
Few people need to have anxiety described for them. It’s that combination of uneasiness and apprehension you feel when you face uncertainty: a new job, a move to a new community, a second marriage, seeing your first child off to college and so forth.
Some degree of anxiety seems to be an unavoidable part of the human condition, given all the uncertainties of life. Certain periods of life – adolescence and middle age – are particularly fraught with anxiety.
To balance out anxiety, we turn to activities we enjoy: time with our friends; participating in hobbies, games or sports; listening to music or reading books. When the causes of anxiety are real, those antidotes usually work pretty well.
But when anxiety is chronic and free-floating – that is, not traceable to any specific cause – those antidotes don’t work. Instead, one experiences an increasing sense of panic. Or the feeling that everything inside is wound up tight. You force yourself to take deep breaths, but that doesn’t calm you down. Perhaps you fly off the handle at the least little thing, then a wave of depression sweeps in. You tend to burst into tears frequently – or feel like you’re going to. In many people, anxiety is accompanied by headaches, stomach troubles or other physical complaints.
When an anxious person goes to a doctor with his or her problem, he or she’s apt to be given a tranquillizer. Or referred to a psychologist, who spends a lot of time investigating past experiences and relationships with other people. Sometimes that works. But sometimes it doesn’t, and the person still ends up with a prescription for tranquillizers.
In a case like that, anxiety is a puzzle – with one of the pieces missing. That piece may an allergy. Working on the possibility that anxiety and allergy are sometimes linked, certain doctors have solved the puzzle of their patients’ ‘baseless’ anxiety. Ronald Finn and H. Newman Cohen, of the Royal Southern Hospital in the Department of Medicine at the University of Liverpool, worked with six people who suffered anxiety and other mental symptoms. All had failed to improve after extensive examination and prolonged medical treatment. The researchers found that coffee and tea were responsible for much of the patients’ anxiety and other psychological problems.
‘The symptoms produced by excessive coffee are probably due to caffeine,’ say Drs Finn and Cohen. ‘The symptoms, which may mimic an anxiety state, include irritability, palpitations, headache and gastrointestinal disturbances.
The implications are clear: if you’ve been overly anxious for no good reason and drink coffee every day (most coffee drinkers do), you’d be smart to give up the brew for a few weeks. Of course, that also means giving up tea, cola, chocolate and over-the-counter pain-killers, which contain either caffeine or caffeine-like compounds. It may take several days for you to completely recover from caffeine, but if that’s the cause of your apprehension, you’ll notice a dramatic drop in anxiety levels.
While Drs Finn and Cohen single out caffeine, they also feel that almost any food to which one is allergic may be the unrecognized cause of baseless anxiety.
‘Unlike conventional allergic reactions, such as a skin rash, the patient is usually unaware of the food to which he is sensitive and may even be unaware that his symptoms might be due to food intolerance,’ say Drs Finn and Cohen. ‘The offending agent is often a favorite food which is taken daily, usually in large quantities’ (Lancet).
Food may not be the only possible offender. Marshall Mandell, an allergist in Norwalk, Connecticut who has done extensive work in the field of allergy, tells of a twenty-five-year-old woman who suffered from anxiety, along with fatigue, depression, menstrual discomfort and conventional allergic problems such as hives and nasal symptoms. Medical treatment had been no help and she’d been advised to seek psychiatric help. Instead, she went to Dr. Mandell, who checked into the possibility that her problems were caused by allergy to foods and chemicals.
I learned that she reacted to freshly manufactured plastics and rubber articles, hair sprays, paints, furniture oils, fumes from gas stoves, car exhaust, chlordane insecticide and a number of foods, says Dr Mandell. ‘When she cleaned up her home environment by removing all offending household products, had her gas stove removed and the inlet pipe that supplied her house sealed off at the meter so that no gas entered her home, and went on to a Rotary Diet that eliminated all of the food to which she had reacted, her symptoms began to subside and in less than a month all of her complaints cleared up’ (DrMandell’s 5-Day Allergy Relief System).
You may not have to take as many steps as that woman did to clear up your anxiety.
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ALLERGIES: VITAMIN Ñ TO THE RESCUE.
March 25th, 2009 | Posted by admin | Category: AllergiesNo Comments
The need for vitamin Ñ seems to be greater in some allergic people,’ Ms Dart told us. ‘For many people, large doses of vitamin Ñ – up to eight grams taken orally, divided over three or four hours – will break a reaction.
‘That’s a lot of vitamin Ñ in anyone’s book,’ she commented. ‘But it’s at that point that the reaction or the symptoms subside.’
To determine the approximate amount of vitamin Ñ required to break an allergic reaction in an individual, Ms Dart works gradually. First she tries three grams, then another gram, until the symptoms subside. (Ms Dart cautions that because such large doses of ascorbic acid can cause stomach or intestinal upsets, people should use the ascorbate forms of vitamin Ñ instead.)
‘The average dose to break a reaction is five to eight grams,’ says Ms Dart. ‘It’s hard to say how the vitamin works – whether it’s because of its antioxidant capabilities [which prevent cell damage], the fact that it boosts the immune system or the vitamin’s antihistamine action. But we use it on a regular basis.’
For hay fever, at least, the way vitamin Ñ works is quite clear: it acts as a natural antihistamine, helping to relieve the red, watery eyes, runny nose and congestion provoked by histamine. Researchers in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn studied 400 people, and found that with higher blood levels of vitamin C, histamine was lower – and vice versa. When eleven people with low vitamin C/ high histamine levels were given daily supplements of 1,000 milligrams [one gram] of vitamin C, their hay fever symptoms improved within three days (Journal of Nutrition).
Dr Stuart Freyer, an ear-nose-and-throat specialist in Bennington, Vermont, prescribes vitamin Ñ for hay fever and gives his patients relatively high amounts of the nutrient. ‘Five grams or more is typical,’ he told us.
Incidentally, Dr Freyer advises anyone taking that much Ñ to take calcium, too.
‘High levels of vitamin Ñ may bind with calcium and pull it out of the bones. It’s then flushed out in the urine when the body discards any excess vitamin C,’ he explains. ‘Vitamin Ñ may also combine with calcium in the diet to interfere with absorption.
‘There should be no problem with calcium deficiency if a person uses vitamin Ñ in the calcium ascorbate form rather than its simple ascorbic acid form, or if the ascorbic acid is supplemented with adequate amounts of calcium,’ he assured us. ‘I usually recommend that my patients take 400 to 600 milligrams of dolomite calcium a day during hay fever season.’
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