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Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy, better known
as allergy injections or desensitization, is the most effective form of
treatment for allergic asthma and other allergic conditions because it modifies
your immune system's reaction to certain triggers.
An allergist can perform skin testing in addition to your medical history, which
helps determine the degree of sensitivity to specific allergens: dust, mold,
cat, dog, trees, and foods, to mention a few.
Initially, but depending on
the severity of the allergy, avoiding the triggering allergens may be the first
step, but often this is impractical, or even impossible. However, food
allergies are essentially treated with avoidance.
Immunotherapy consists of specifically formulated and diluted allergen extracts
of inhalant allergens from tree, grass, and weed pollens, mold spores, dust
mites and sometimes animal dander, to treat allergic asthma, allergic rhinitis
and allergic conjunctivitis.
Typically, an effective immunotherapy program requires weekly or bi-weekly
injections for at least three to five years. Your allergist will gradually
build up your dose by increasing the amount of allergen concentration weekly
until you begin to feel relief at which time you start a maintenance period. The
maintenance dose, which refers to a fixed amount of maximum concentration that
you can tolerate, can continue with extended intervals between injections, from
two weeks to one month apart, depending on your progress and if you have any
adverse reactions during build-up.
In many cases, if your
sensitivity to triggering allergens improves during the course of immunotherapy,
you can maintain your level of allergy improvement for several years or in some
cases for life, with no need to restart injections.
However, in some cases and withdrawing from immunotherapy the reappearance of
allergic symptoms may occur. Therefore, your allergist will need to evaluate
the specifics of your symptoms and individual circumstances when considering the
possibility of restarting immunotherapy or choosing another route of treatment.
With all this in mind, it is very important that you wait at least twenty
minutes in the clinic in the event you might experience a reaction. Your
allergist can immediately assess the reaction to adequately decrease your next
dose and qualified assistance is immediately available in case of a severe
generalized reaction.
By Dr. Yong H. Tsai
Published in The Daytona Beach News-Journal
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