How to Manage Allergic Reactions and Symptoms with Medication

How to Manage Allergic Reactions and Symptoms with Medication : Seasonal allergies aren’t just allergies that occur in early spring or summer. In fact, seasonal allergies can occur all year long, including winter. If your body is easily triggered by allergens in one season, it is more likely to be triggered by allergens in other seasons.

The reason why you may be sensitive to allergens all year long is because your body is already in “trigger mode.” It already has a response system in place for allergens that trigger a bodily reaction. What you may think is just a cold in winter may, in fact, be an allergic response.

There are some more very interesting facts about seasonal allergies. There are also new methods that can help you manage allergic reactions and symptoms such that your body’s response to allergens decreases over time. It may even be possible for an allergist to eliminate responses to specific allergens that can be found in every season, thereby eliminating your reaction to those allergens all year long.

Indoor Allergies That Can Trigger a Response in All Four Seasons

It doesn’t matter whether you live in Florida or Minnesota. These allergens can trigger a response all year because they exist both inside and outside your home. If you spend a lot of time indoors and wonder why you are having an allergic response in cooler weather, it may just be that you are allergic to one of the most common indoor/outdoor allergens of all.

These indoor/outdoor allergens include:

mold
dust and dust mites
pet dander, saliva, urine and fur
cockroach fecal matter
rodents and rodent droppings
dead insect husks
other insect parts
holiday plants (e.g., Christmas trees, holly, evergreen boughs, poinsettias, etc.)

The best prevention for a majority of these allergens is to keep your home pest-free and as clean as possible, but that’s not quite as easy as you might think. A professional cleaning of your home’s ventilation system helps clear out a lot of the above and prevents it from blowing into and circulating around your home. The rest is just constant upkeep and not bringing plants indoors.

Outdoor Allergens

These are typically the trigger allergens you encounter during the warmer months, although some may still be present in colder months. Since it is next to impossible to avoid going outside every day, it just becomes necessary to know which of these allergens is a problem for you and how you can treat them.

These allergens include:

Tree pollen (including evergreen pollen!)
Grass pollen
Weed Pollen
Flower pollen (sometimes specific flowers, sometimes all flowers!)
Literally anything small or microscopic that can float on the breeze/wind

It might surprise you to learn that evergreens DO produce pollen, and that their pollen does not stop production in winter. It does slow down, but it is still in the air. Mold spores also attach to this greenery, and intense aromas can trigger a reaction too.

If you bring fresh cut trees or greenery into your home for Christmas, you are bringing some of that evergreen pollen into a small space. It is better to avoid allergies during the holidays by just avoiding “live” trees and greenery. The rest of the year you will have to address your symptoms with medication.

An allergy doctor can help you with various treatments to decrease and eliminate your reactions to any or all of the above allergens.

Antihistamines: The Most Common Treatment

A histamine reaction is the body’s way of reacting to something it misinterprets as “dangerous”. It tries to force the “dangerous” substance out of the body by telling your respiratory system to sneeze, cough, water it out, and blow it out your nose. To treat this histamine reaction, the allergy specialist prescribes an antihistamine, a drug that counteracts your body’s histamine response.

Most antihistamines can be purchased over the counter (i.e., off a store shelf). However, if your symptoms are not effectively controlled with the medicines and dosages sold over the counter, your allergy specialist may prescribe a stronger medicine you can only get from the pharmacist. Typically, these prescribed antihistamines have to be taken for a couple of weeks to let them build up in your system and then you have to continue taking them to counteract the allergens on a daily basis.

Prescribed antihistamines may be written as a seasonal-only medication, unless you exhibit allergies in more than one season. Initially, your allergy specialist will prescribe the medication to treat your allergies for the season in which you have been diagnosed. If it seems like your allergies continue into the next season or re-emerge in another season, you may need to take the medication for most of the year.

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy is the introduction of a small dose of an allergen into your system, usually via a shot. The purpose of this type of therapy is to get your body to have a response to the allergen, but on a smaller scale. A small scale reaction is readily controlled, and your body is allowed to build up a tolerance.

As you build a tolerance to the small doses of an allergen, the allergy specialist performing the immunotherapy increases the amount of allergen in your shot. This step-up occurs every time your body becomes used to the allergen. When your body no longer responds negatively to an allergen, you can transition to “booster shots” to help your body recognize the allergen in your environment and not react to it.

The only downside to immunotherapy is that this process has to be done singularly and apart for EACH allergen that causes you problems. For example, let’s say that you are allergic to cat dander, dust mites, mold, and pine tree pollen. You can select only one of these for your first round of immunotherapy shots. The amount and type of allergen in each shot can only be administered one at a time.

In this way your allergy specialist knows that you are only responding positively to the treatment for one allergen and negatively to the remaining allergens. It properly gauges the efficacy of the shots and how your specialist will proceed. If you try to treat all four of your allergens simultaneously with immunotherapy shots, there’s no way to gauge if they are fully working for you.

However, for people who cannot and do not get any relief from other means of treatment, or for people with extreme allergies, immunotherapy is a godsend. You don’t have to take pills or nasal sprays anymore once all of your individual allergens have been fully treated by immunotherapy. The most common of indoor and outdoor allergies benefit from this type of therapy and provide you with greater freedom to live your best life.

Side Effects of Immunotherapy

Without question, you may experience some side effects of these shots. Since you are receiving a small dose of an allergen in each shot, you are likely to experience some symptoms when you start this therapy. Continued treatment will cause you to experience symptoms less and less.

Additionally, your other allergies may flare up. This is not a reflection on the treatment for a particular allergen. It’s just your usual response to a different allergen.