Are You Allergic to Cats?

Robert W. Griffith, MD

Cats are often blamed for an allergic collection of symptoms, without necessarily being the cause. Doctors are often willing to point the finger. But after getting rid of the cat, many people find that they are allergic to house-dust mites, or chemicals from a new carpet.

For those truly allergic to cats, it's not the cat hair but the dandruff (dust) on the cat's hair and skin that's responsible. All cats produce dandruff, though some produce less than others. No cat is allergen-free, not even hairless cats.

What to do (apart from banning your pussy from the home)? Desensitization is the usual approach. But this involves many visits to the doctor's office, pin prick sticks, and a wait to see if a serious reaction occurs. Now there's an alternative that should be just as good. It's described in the journal Allergy, and comes from Spain.

Sublingual immunotherapy, or SLIT, uses extracts derived from epithelial cells. In the case of cats, it's a standardized cat dander (dried skin/hair dust) extract. 25cat-allergic patients were given SLIT drops, daily, for a year; another 25 got placebo drops. The strength of the SLIT was built up gradually.

After a year they were challenged by spending up to 90 minutes in a room in which a cat was housed. Those given the SLIT had a 62% reduction in symptoms, compared with their baseline symptoms with the same challenge. The placebo patients had no reduction in their symptoms. The treated subjects also had an improvement in their skin test reactions to standardized cat extract; the placebo subjects had no improvement. There were no side effects reported.

The advantages of this approach are no jabs and no apparent side effects. The disadvantages are daily, rather than weekly, treatments - but the treatment can be given at home. Efficacy is probably comparable to injected allergen treatment, but this has to be confirmed in further studies. And then it has to be approved by the FDA before you can get it for yourself or your child...

Source
HealthandAge Blog

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