NIAID lays down the law for food allergies

Voov's got this red inflammation on her face, around her mouth. Suddenly broke out today. It looks like she's having a reaction to something, maybe food, except that she's been eating the same stuff she has been eating for many months. Zucchini, broccoli, sweet potato, corn, tofu, rice, chicken, turkey, pear, banana-- and that's it. She doesn't avoid certain foods, she excludes everything but.

It just occurred to me that maybe she ate something off the floor. Shmoop, at 3.75 years, doesn't have a spotless record in conveying food from plate to mouth. Maybe he dropped a noodle or piece of omelet or something that Voov hoovered up when we weren't watching.

Anyway, although her skin was good for a long while, it's flaring up just in time for her dermatology appointment on Thursday. That's the way it should be. Much better than right afterward.

You've probably seen this all over the news: a panel of experts vetted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has just released guidelines for clinical diagnosis and treatment of food allergies. There's what appears to be a decent writeup in the Wall Street Journal health section (I saw several other instances, but this was the best).

1. The original paper is--guess where--in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, my favorite eczema mag. The paper is a doorstopper. (At 14 pages, it appears to be a shortened version of the real guidelines!) I'm only a little way into it, but I do mean to go through it and find what parts of it are specifically applicable to eczema. I want to comment on a couple things that jumped out at me though. they're defining a food allergy as "an adverse health effect arising from a specific immune response that occurs reproducibly on exposure to a given food"-- that is, at first glance, they're not considering the magnitude of the reaction
2. they're distinguishing between a patient just having IgE antibodies to food allergens and having an actual allergic reaction. Having antibodies is called "sensitization" and doesn't necessarily imply an allergy.
3. this from the WSJ piece: "It's especially hard to pinpoint a true food allergy in young children with eczema, since they make IgE antibodies to many foods. 'If you did 100 food tests, all 100 would be positive. That's what we see from patients coming in from around the country,' says David Fleischer" of National Jewish Health in Denver.

That's in line with what I heard when I requested a RAST test for allergies about 5 years ago. My allergist told me that people like me, with eczema, just overwhelmed the assay because we had so much IgE floating around.

I'll be interested to see if there's anything new in these guidelines that can help me and my daughter. It's hard to imagine, because I'm a trained scientist, but after 40 years of living in this body I am still not sure exactly what it's allergic to.