How to seek medical advices intelligently for allergic patients?- do you really need an allergen test?

        Allergy is a kind of common constitution. The clinical symptoms include urticaria, eczema, asthma and allergic rhinitis. If the course of disease is prolonged and repeated, it will cause great trouble in life. Therefore, many specious "medical knowledge" are circulating in the public. This article will break these myths and help you successfully stay away from allergic life.

        The so-called "smart medical treatment" is a new concept, which enables the public to understand the correct medical information and use it in medical decision-making to avoid unnecessary examinations, drugs or operations.

        The following are the recommendations of asthma and Immunology for allergy in the United States

        1、 It is not recommended to check the allergen IgE index without a specific suspected history of food allergy

        For unexplained skin allergies, the general public often think that as long as the blood can know what kind of food is causing allergies, as long as we avoid this kind of food in the future. However, allergy is not necessarily the intake of specific food or inhalation of allergens, sometimes lack of sleep or stress can also lead to symptoms, so clinical often can not ask the relevant factors, and the general allergen test can not include every kind of food. Taking physical urticaria as an example, it can be diagnosed mainly through interrogation, without blood drawing.

        Moreover, the characteristics of allergen test are not suitable for screening, only for identifying possible allergens. General food or drug allergy is 30 minutes to 2 hours after the entrance, mouth numbness, throat discomfort, asthma or rash symptoms, if the symptoms are very obvious, can be diagnosed according to the history, do not need to test allergens.

        Therefore, allergen detection is only suitable for improving the certainty of suspected food allergy diagnosis. For children under five years of age with atopic dermatitis, the health insurance can pay for allergen detection, mainly because it is relatively difficult for pediatric patients to communicate with each other, so blood sampling test is used as an auxiliary, while adult allergen detection is not applicable.

        2、 Routine tests for chronic urticaria are not recommended

        Chronic urticaria is defined as: more than six weeks of urticaria, the rash on the body like a mosquito bite, protruding one by one, accompanied by itching. Usually, it is not caused by specific food, and a few are caused by healthy food or drugs taken every day, which makes diagnosis difficult.

        It has been reported in newspapers and magazines that abnormal liver and kidney functions were found in patients with itchy skin by blood sampling. This is actually a rare case. Regular health examination can reduce this kind of situation. In the outpatient department of immunology and rheumatology, sometimes the blood cell classification will be checked for chronic urticaria to confirm whether there is abnormal increase of eosinophilic white blood cells related to allergy, and whether the liver and kidney function is abnormal, so as to make patients feel at ease. As for allergen testing, patients are only advised to check at their own expense when a specific allergen is highly suspected.

        In addition, some very special cases, such as patients with tachycardia, will check the thyroid function, because a small number of patients with hyperthyroidism will be combined with refractory urticaria, if in the treatment of urticaria antihistamine drugs, plus the treatment of hyperthyroidism drugs, the effect will be better.

        Some patients worry about whether chronic allergies represent poor immunity? To be precise, allergy is a kind of immune reaction that causes discomfort and seems to be meaningless, but it usually does not affect the resistance to pathogens, so as long as you are at ease with the treatment of allergic symptoms. Although the immune system is very complex and there is no single corresponding test to directly reflect it, it can be dealt with only through interrogation and basic test.

        3、 It is not recommended to open allergy test without medical basis, such as allergen IgG test, or open screening allergen IgE set test without medical history

        It is a wrong idea that the name of "chronic allergen test" is often used for allergen IgG test. In fact, such tests only add to the confusion, because food IgG antibodies in human blood are usually not related to allergies. Not only that, for food IgE detection, in the case of no doubt specific allergens but comprehensive screening, blood sampling results are not only inaccurate, but also cause the shadow of the public diet. The principle of allergen detection is conditional probability, which is not as intuitive as the measurement of blood pressure in hypertension or blood glucose in diabetes, so we must be cautious in interpretation.

        In conclusion, allergen testing is meaningful only when it can influence medical decision-making. If the wrong idea is not clarified, no amount of allergy testing can bring peace of mind. The promotion of the concept of "smart medical treatment" can avoid unnecessary cost and anxiety caused by over examination. The most important thing for chronic allergy is to ask doctors to adjust a long-term and safe treatment combination to reduce the discomfort of allergy. Although the radical cure can not be guaranteed, there is a chance of remission under long-term treatment. Readers are expected to establish correct concepts, cooperate with doctors in diagnosis and treatment, and take good care of themselves.

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