Allergies & Asthma

Those in the food allergic reaction neighborhood understand the leading 8 food irritants like the rear of their hand: Milk Eggs Fish Shellfish Tree nuts Peanuts Wheat Soy The speak about including sesame to the leading 8 food irritants– making it the brand-new “leading 9”– has actually been a huge subject recently. With brand-new study

Every year, winter brings a variety of viruses, and 2020 brought a new one that is concerning to most – COVID-19. While people tend to disregard allergy as a cause of winter illness because most outdoor allergens are minimal, there’s an exception in the south. It’s called Cedar Fever, and it can cause some pretty

TTHealthWatch is a weekly podcast from Texas Tech. In it, Elizabeth Tracey, director of electronic media for Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Rick Lange, MD, president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, look at the top medical stories of the week. A transcript of the podcast is below the summary. This

During the holidays, time spent at your own home can seem like a far off memory – you’re bouncing from your in-laws’ cabin to a best friend’s apartment to grandma’s house. It’s all in good fun, to celebrate a wonderful time of year with people you love, but it can expose you to a variety

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of wasteful spending in healthcare, and patients have become increasingly frustrated by this as their insurance premiums have skyrocketed. Yet unnecessary procedures are still performed every day in the U.S. — and sometimes patients are harmed as a result. MedPage Today‘s Enterprise & Investigative Reporting team needs your

New therapies and devices for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) were approved in 2020 and researchers continued to explore expanding the definition of disease beyond spirometry. But 2020 was dominated by the struggles managing the care of highly vulnerable COPD patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID Paradox The delivery of routine components of COPD care,

The coronavirus pandemic has been a particularly scary time for children with asthma and their parents, but there is growing evidence that as a group kids with asthma are not only doing OK during COVID-19, but may actually be doing better. A study in Annals of the American Thoracic Society documented a steep drop in

“While doctors have long believed that dementia presents in the checkbook, our study helps show that these financial symptoms are common and span years before and after diagnosis.” — Lauren Hersch Nicholas, PhD, MPP, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, on research showing difficulties with finances were evident long before dementia diagnosis. “Hospitals, they want

New guidelines from the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (NAEPP) of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) — the agency’s first update since 2007 — take account of new management options including single maintenance and reliever therapy (SMART) and long-acting muscarinic antagonists (LAMAs). As has long been standard practice, the foundation for

Note that some links may require registration or subscription. Pfizer and BioNTech announced emergency authorization from the United Kingdom for their COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday. Meanwhile, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows invited FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD, to come explain why his agency hasn’t yet granted an emergency use authorization (EUA) for Pfizer’s

Omalizumab (Xolair) maintained efficacy for chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps, a researcher reported. In an open-label extension study of two, 24-week clinical trials, omalizumab was associated with significant improvements in nasal polyp scores (mean change -0.97, 95% CI -1.25 to -0.69), nasal congestion scores (mean change -0.99, 95% CI -1.14 to -0.83), and Sino-Nasal Outcome

Owning a dog while pregnant appeared to shape children’s immune systems well into adolescence, a researcher reported. In a cohort of 1,193 mother-child pairs in southeast Michigan, the area under the curve for immunoglobulin E levels over ages 10-14 (“IgE trajectory”) was 28.8% lower in children with prenatal pet exposure vs children whose mothers kept

Food allergy diagnoses have nearly doubled among Black children in the past two decades, and racial disparities have emerged for parents managing food allergy, according to a pair of studies. Among 326 parents whose children had food allergies, white children were close to 3 times as likely as Black children to have access to allergen-free

Treatment with the investigational anti-IgE biologic ligelizumab was generally effective in patients with H1 antihistamine-unresponsive chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) who did not achieve complete symptom control with omalizumab (Xolair), an exploratory analysis of a phase IIb extension study showed. In a subset of omalizumab-treated patients with a score greater than 0 on the 7-day urticaria

Switching to telemedicine for routine asthma visits in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic was linked with positive disease control and an increase in appointment “show rates” among Los Angeles inner city children, a researcher reported. Delivery of routine asthma care via telemedicine did not appear to negatively impact asthma control among the children

Black children were more likely to have wheat, soy, and seafood allergies than white children, with the starkest differences seen with shellfish, survey data from the FORWARD cohort showed. The analysis of phenotypic differences among a sampling of close to 650 food-allergic children showed that nearly one in four Black children under age 5 had

The investigational monoclonal antibody tezepelumab proved to be an effective therapy for uncontrolled severe asthma in patients with and without perennial and seasonal allergies, a post-hoc analysis of data from the phase II PATHWAY study found. The subgroup analysis focused on patients who did and did not have baseline sensitivity to perennial allergens such as

Patients with allergies to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) could be at an increased risk for opioid use disorder, a researcher reported. In a cohort of patients with osteoarthritis in a large hospital system in Massachusetts, those with NSAID allergies had a significantly higher risk of receiving a future diagnosis of opioid use disorder compared with

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays where certain foods are almost a requirement. People have nostalgia for this special meal all year, and come to expect the delicious, savory foods on the fourth Thursday of November. For those with food allergies, it can be tough to detour – or ask the host to detour –

When warm weather hit this spring, people flocked outside to get socially distant – hikes, walks, camping, picnics. If a scratchy throat or cough arrived, many had to debate whether their symptoms were from outdoor allergens, or if they had come down with COVID-19. As weather gets cooler and we’re forced back indoors, many may

Results from a preliminary study showed novel voice and breath analysis using a smartphone app to be a useful measure of lung function, and researchers say the technique may prove to be a valuable tool for identifying and monitoring respiratory disease. Automated voice and breath analysis was found to have value for predicting lung function,

Patients with cancer and COVID-19 have a higher risk of severe disease and mortality, researchers reported. Of 89 cancer patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) due to COVID-19, 32 died, a mortality rate of 36%, reported Michael Dang, MD, a critical care fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City,

Company culture can be a big reason someone is drawn to working for a company, and a strong culture can keep employees for the long run. Many companies have raised the bar in terms of expectations as more companies try to compete with Silicon Valley-type companies – free access to bikes on company campus, catered

Patients diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who reported using marijuana had less risk of in-hospital mortality and pneumonia than non-users, according to a nationwide population-based study. Use of marijuana was associated with a 37.6% reduction in the odds of dying in the hospital (OR 0.624, 95% CI 0.407-0.958, P=0.0309) among patients diagnosed with

You can’t talk about the emergence of sublingual immunotherapy in the U.S. without mentioning Dr. David Morris (1929-2017), a true innovator in allergy. When traditional allergy treatment didn’t work for his patients, he didn’t tell them to give up and live with their symptoms — he changed the narrative on what allergy treatment could and

Kids whose mothers had depression and anxiety during pregnancy were at a greater risk of asthma in later childhood, according to a prospective cohort study based in the Netherlands. Mothers who experienced stress or depression while pregnant had children with a 46%-91% increased risk of asthma later on (range OR 1.46 [95% CI 1.12-1.90] to

There is no medical justification for exempting respiratory patients from compulsory face mask regulations, and doing so places this already vulnerable population at greater risk for COVID-19, a global group of pulmonary specialists said. Beginning in May, the Spanish government mandated face masks in open- and closed-space public places, but the mandate exempted people with

You know the saying “it’s just the tip of the iceberg” – have you ever thought of it in terms of allergy? About one in five people have allergies, but only a portion of them have the typical allergy symptoms – itching, sneezing, and runny nose – that are associated with seasonal allergic rhinitis. Many