Allergy Sufferers: New Treatments Provide Hope, Relief

Spring and seasonal allergy symptoms can be tough. Sneezing, runny nose, watery eyes and congestion make it difficult to go about your day.

You've tried everything?

Maybe not. New treatments, proven effective for some allergy sufferers when others have not, are here.

Think your allergies have been getting worse? Read more to find out why.

If you have been putting up with your annual wheezing, thinking it's not so bad, you may want to think again. As Dr. Clifford Bassett, the founder and medical director of Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, points out, these symptoms may just be the the beginning.

“A lot of people complain about fatigue during the allergy season,” Bassett explained. “What’s that all about? What it means is that they’re having poor sleep. When you have a cold, you can sleep all night and you wake up and feel lousy, because you’re not getting that great REM, restorative sleep.

“So you wake up and you feel tired,” he continued. “Not so much because you have allergies, but because you have congested nasal passages and you don’t sleep as well at night. You sleep less successfully and healthily.”

The negative effects don’t stop there. Allergies can make us irritable, anxious, and may even contribute to depression.

How to manage your symptoms

Even if your allergy symptoms are pretty mild, you can benefit a lot from knowing the dos and don’ts for navigating allergy season.

Here are some of the most important tips to manage your symptoms:

• Wear sunglasses outdoors. Glasses help protect your eyes from direct contact with pollen and other airborne allergens that cause itchy and watery eyes. Large or wrap-around glasses in particular may be most helpful.
• Stop using a clothesline. When you dry your clothes and linens outdoors in the spring, they are likely to get covered with pollen. Once you bring them inside, the pollen comes along for the ride, and this may trigger your allergic symptoms.
• Clean the pollen off your jackets, shoes, dogs, and hair. Pollen can cover anything, and if you’re bringing it in your home you may never be able to avoid your symptoms. Figure out the ways pollen gets in your home, and take simple steps to keep it out.
• Make sure your windows are closed between 4 A.M. and 10 A.M. These are peak hours for pollen, and the last thing you want is pollen wafting into your house through an open window.
• Keep track of the pollen count in your area and plan accordingly. If the pollen count is particularly high, it may be a good day to exercise indoors.
• Wear a pollen mask, especially during yard work. Pollen masks may help to reduce your irritation during activities in which exposure to pollen is unavoidable.
• Select flowers wisely. Whether you’re gardening or buying flowers for indoors, make sure to avoid any flowers that might trigger your allergies. Dr Bassett specifically recommends avoiding star jasmine, narcissus, gardenias, impatiens, lily of the valley, dahlia, lavender, lilac, jasmine and aster.

Thanks to Dr. Bassett; Dr. Mariana Castells, allergist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and SafeBee for providing help with these tips.

Medical approaches

While these tips should help people manage their symptoms, people with severe allergy symptoms may want to seek help from a medical professional. There are many medical options that can provide relief.

Antihistamines are available widely without a prescription, and many individuals use them frequently to fight their symptoms. However, some antihistamines, like Benadryl, can cause side-effects like drowsiness that many users want to avoid.

Nasal sprays, including steroid and non-steroid versions, can help reduce symptoms, and so can decongestants. Sprays containing steroids usually need a prescription, while others can be bought over the counter; both can be used long term.

Many people believe that their nasal sprays stop working after a while, but Bassett points out that this is because as symptoms worsen, congestion can often prevent nasal sprays from being effective. He strongly recommends the technique of “nasal priming,” which means using nasal sprays before they become necessary if you know you’ll need it. If you know you’re likely to suffer from severe allergy symptoms, you may want to make a plan with your doctor to address your allergies before they start.

New treatments

For those who struggle to control their symptoms with the above methods, allergists sometimes recommend the use of “allergy vaccines,” also known as immunotherapy. These treatments can take years, but they potentially offer long-term relief for people with severe allergy symptoms. One form of immunotherapy involves a series of injections to build up a tolerance to the specific allergen.

There’s also a growing body of evidence for a form of sublingual immunotherapy, which relies on a principle similar to that of the injections but is instead administered in the form of a pill or drops placed under the tongue repeatedly over a long period of time.

”Those [treatments] have been shown to have been extremely effective at changing the quality of life of those patients,” Castells said.

Bassett expressed a similar enthusiasm for these treatments. “It’s a very powerful treatment to stop the progression of allergies, and it’s a very exciting treatment.

“The key is: it’s treatable, it’s fixable in most cases, and we can improve quality of life dramatically and cost-effectively.”

Photo Credit: Nan Palmero via Flickr