Allergy | Causes, diagnosis, treatment

How to Arrange Food Allergy Testing

In case you notice symptoms such as skin irritation, hives, rash, swelling, whenever you are eating certain foods, then you should suspect food allergies and ask for investigations. The main way to stay symptom-free is avoidance of the incriminated foods, so the sooner you know which are they, the better. Part of this article may be valid also for cases of dog food allergy, but you should not attempt to diagnose your dog by yourself: take it to a vet as soon as you can.

Food allergy testing

For identifying a food allergy, you need to go for special tests. After you have the list of substances which trigger allergic reactions from your immune system, you need to stay away from them. Repeated exposure to the allergen will only exacerbate your allergy symptoms. Eventually, it may even endanger your life, as death by suffocation is possible, due to the swelling of your airway passages.

Being allergic to certain substances (foods, pollens, dust or anything else) means that your immune system perceives those otherwise harmless substances as a menace to the body, and starts fighting to eliminate them. This body fight consists on releasing chemicals to neutralize the enemies, thus provoking you unpleasant and dangerous symptoms.

Food allergies testing can be done in two ways:

Food Allergies Skin Prick Test

A food allergy skin prick test is based on making a small prick on the skin using a needle and pouring a little amount of the allergen you want to test for. After a half an hour, in case you are allergic, your skin would have reacted and became all red and swollen around the prick. The bigger the reaction, the more severe your allergy to that substance.

If you are not allergic, there would be absolutely no swelling at all. The advantage of the allergy prick test is that you get your results very fast (immediately) and it is not painful.

There are yet some situations when prick tests are dangerous to be performed: if you had a very violent allergic reaction, then putting your body in contact with the allergen may cause you severe symptoms which are not local but generalized, so you may even die from such a test. In order not to threaten your life, you’d better go for the second type of allergy testing:

Food Allergy Blood Test

This test is safe, as it requires you to give a blood sample, which would be taken to the lab and put in contact with the suspected allergens. There, the level of histamines released by your blood would be measured and the values would be compared with the benchmark ones.
The results can take a few weeks until complete, but you’ll receive a long list with foods which you need top avoid in order to improve your life quality and even save yourself from death. Food allergies are not a joke at all. This is why food safety is a permanent concern of FDA, so all foods are carefully labeled , in order to avoid allergic incidents.

Such tests can be run on dogs, to see if they are allergic to foods. However, in this case, tests are not very relevant, so you might be dealing with a severe dog food allergy and the tests show up clean.

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