Daughter is allergic to sesame, horses. Horses!?

Unfortunately medicine is still far from the Star Trek tricorder stage, at which you can just wave your iPhone over someone and tell what they’re allergic to, but the next best thing is specific IgE testing. We got my daughter V’s results back today. I found the process and fascinating and the outcome illuminating.

IgE are the antibodies responsible for allergy. The IgE results we got consisted of an antibody quantity in units/ml (whatever “units” are), plus a “class” (from 0 to VI) which indicates the degree of allergy. Class can range from “negative” to “extremely high positive.”

Now, I need to talk to an allergist to figure out what is meant by “class”. It seems to be a value that a clinician makes a guess at based on the IgE measurement and the patient’s medical history and, possibly, the allergen in question. From what I can tell the class reported can vary depending on the assay and the person doing the estimating.

The results:

V  is apparently moderately allergic to peanut (3.7 U/ml, class III) and almond (2.5 U/ml, class II) so tree nuts are still out.

She’s allergic to milk (8.3 U/ml, class III), which we know all too well, since only last week I gave her milk by accident and she spent the next half hour barfing on the kitchen floor.

Quite a surprise to find out was that her highest antibody level is to sesame (14.7 U/ml, class III). I once gave her sesame sticks once and she vomited. I gave her a sesame bagel and she said her stomach hurt. But she’s been happily eating pressed sheets of nori (seaweed) that apparently contain sesame oil. Anyway, from now on: no sesame!

And here’s the funny thing. Along with her brother, she gets horse-riding lessons every two weeks. She comes back from them all blotchy in the face. We thought it might be from grass pollen, but on a whim my wife had her tested for allergy to “horse dander.” And she tested positive (3.4 U/ml, class II)!

But no allergy to rye grass pollen.

Allergic to horses. Who knew. Well, that ought to be an easy one to avoid. And it’ll give me a great excuse when she starts demanding a pony for her birthday.

New NEA blog post on allergy tests for eczema

I just wrote a new post on the NEA blog, about food allergy tests for eczema. I interviewed Jon Hanifin, a professor at Oregon Health Sciences University and one of the giants in the field of eczema research and practice. (Eczema is commonly diagnosed using the "Hanifin and Rajka" criteria.) Read the post if you are wondering how useful allergy tests are for food triggers of eczema.

The last few weeks my family has been under a lot of stress because my five-year-old son just started kindergarten. He has been unhappy about moving to a new school--where he's in a class of 28 (his preschool had 14 kids) and about 500 students attend total. He cries when we drop him off, when we mention school, and at night when he protests that he doesn't want to go. Plus there's homework--four pages a day, for a kindergartner! and Dad's Club and PTA. So you can understand why my posts have been a bit sparse. The pace will pick up again, I'm sure.