With food allergies, you can avoid offending foods. What about environmental allergies? Kind of hard to live in a bubble. Good thing there are drops for allergies.
This is not the first time I have addressed this option for allergy sufferers. Basically, the use of drops under the tongue (sublingual) has been shown to be consistently effective at helping to manage allergies. I have addressed this in detail in a previous post that can be read by clicking here.
However, there has been a major weakness in many of previous studies that I have reviewed.
They are designed as a one-allergen type of approach. Basically, in setting up the studies, researchers picked a single allergen (such as peanuts) and provided the treatment using the sublingual drops for allergies focused on a single allergen. In real life, people are rarely allergic to one single thing. Once the immune system gets pissed off, it starts firing off at multiple allergens. Rarely is it a single allergen.
Despite this, the results of these studies have been pretty solid. So what happens when a research study is set up to treat for more than one allergen? Turns out we have an answer in this particular study.
Researchers treated for not one, but TWO types of dust mites with sublingual drops for allergies in a group of seniors aged 60-75. Here’s the specifics:
- The trial lasted 3 years.
- The total nasal symptom score decreased by 44% in the active group and 6% in the placebo group (Tweet this).
- In the group that got the drops for allergies, the total medication score dropped 51%.
- There were no systemic adverse reactions during the study.
These are pretty good results for an approach as simple as sublingual immunotherapy with no real incidence of adverse reactions. While I highlighted the fact that this study used 2 different allergens, there are practitioners out there using sublingual immunotherapy that treat for many more allergens in the drops for allergies. The more that are used, the greater the chance of toning down the entire immune response and really helping to make the patient feel better.
Have you tried sublingual immunotherapy before or currently? If so, how does the response compared to other methods you have tried in the past?