Nutsallergies.info

What Are the Tests for Nut Allergies?

If you seem to have a problem with allergies whenever you are eating, it may be more than a simple problem that you are experiencing.  As a matter of fact, if you are having a nut allergy, the problem may be mild today but tomorrow it could take your life.

That is because our body reacts to things that it is allergic to in different ways, on different days.  One day we may just have a slight rash or perhaps a little bit of extra mucus as a result of eating nuts.  The next day, however, it can throw us into an anaphylactic shock and kill us.

If we feel that we may have a nut allergy, it is important that we speak to our physician as soon as we figure this out in order to find out if something can be done about it.

The doctor is going to run a series of tests that will determine if we are dealing with a nut allergy or not.  You might be surprised to find out that it is possible that we have an intolerance for this type of food but are not actually dealing with an allergy.  If that is the case, what we are experiencing is more or less an inconvenience and will never be life-threatening.

There are two different ways that you may be tested to find out if you have nut allergies:

• The first way is known as a prick test and it is the easiest of the two to perform.  Basically, your skin is going to be scratched with a needle that contains a little bit of the proteins that exist in the nuts.  Your doctor is going to watch this area for a reaction that will occur within moments after this test takes place.
• The second type of test is a blood test.  Because our body releases antibodies whenever it is having a reaction to the proteins that exist in nuts, it is easy to determine if we have an allergy.  By extracting a sample of our blood and checking in to see if these specific antibodies are present, the doctor is able to tell accurately if we have an allergy or not.  If he finds out that we do, we will need to become educated on what we need to do in order to make sure that we never come in contact with nuts again.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.