What Are You Allergic To?

In a few months the temperature will start warming up and Spring will be upon us. Spring is traditionally the season for allergies, when pollen and other foreign particles are in the air in huge quantities.  Rhinitis, sinusitis, bronchitis during this time of year can all be allergy related.  It’s not just a little problem.  It’s the fifth leading cause of chronic disease in North America.  It causes more than 15 million doctor visits each year.  An estimated $8 billion dollars is annually expended on costs related to allergies.  It’s just astronomical the numbers related to this.  It’s probably the leading cause of absenteeism in work.  I struggle with that because I also hear that back pain is the most common, but it’s right up there at the top.  It’s nothing to sneeze at!

A lot of people don’t even know that they have it.  I was with my mother in Athens, Georgia some time ago. We were talking about allergies and springtime allergies.  I said, “Don’t you have some?”  She said, “No.  I seem to finish every winter with a little cold right as spring arrives, but no, I don’t have allergies.”  Well, I hate to tell you, Mom, but if you have a seasonally recurring cold that seems to happen about the same time every year including stuffy, runny nose, sneezing, wheezing, it may well not be a cold at all.  It’s probably allergies.  

Why does it seem so much like a cold?  Because your body is responding to foreign invaders in your body, particularly in the sinus passages and in the lungs.  There is an altered immune response to the effect of your body attacking pollen just like it would a bacteria or a virus.  So for all intents and purposes it is almost impossible for you to tell the difference sometimes.  You may relate it to the yellow stuff landing on your car or when you see the ragweed floating through the air in little pollen pods in the fall.  If you take an anti-histamine and notice that it gets better, you’ll know it’s an allergy.  If no one else has a cold or it’s not cold season it is sometimes then related to allergies and we have an ah-ha moment.  “This may not be a cold.”

The very same process happens with pollen as it does with bacteria and viruses.  There are something called mast cells in your skin that when they come in contact with these foreign particles they release histamine.  That’s where the famed anti-histamine works as a treatment.  But your basophils, a type of white blood cell, also release histamine.  The purpose of basophils is to dilate small blood vessels so that more white blood cells can get out of the blood vessel and into the tissue to fight these foreign invaders.  The white blood cells come there and they attach these particles creating the stuffiness and the inflammation and drainage you get from allergies.  

A lot of people get a very inflamed nose.  I’ve had a lot of people when I did family practice who would come in and say “My throat is so dry and scratchy.”  I would look in the back of the throat and it was just slimy, red and wet, if I can be that descriptive.  It was because the drainage from their nose was very caustic.  The reason why drainage occurs is because the body is making this material to kill bacteria, fungi, and viruses, so of course it’s going to be caustic material.  It has hydrogen peroxide in it.  It has histamine in it.  It has all kinds of cytokines and chemokines that are really designed to kill cells.  No wonder it is irritating to the front of the nose when you blow your nose and to the back of the throat as it drips down.  

It’s interesting, the percentage of the population having significant allergies have doubled about every 15-20 years.  There is something going on out there.  We have so many new things in our environment, all the way from plastics to MTBE in your gasoline. There are hundreds of new toxic substances created every year and we don’t even realize a lot of times what they are or where they’re coming from.  We now literally have thousands and thousands of man-made chemicals that didn’t exist in organic chemistry.  Our bodies had never had a chance to look at or respond to them until just a short span of time relative to human history and bio-development, certainly in the last few decades in relationship to modern history. 

In the end, the rise of allergies in our population may have as simple an explanation as the good old “s” word, stress.  Every year the government produces a productivity index.  Since they’ve been keeping that, the productivity of Americans have gone up, (except for recently with the recession).  What does that mean?  That means that you’re doing more in less time.  That sounds like a good definition for stress to me.  As we do more in less time, certainly our stress level goes up.  So that in and of itself would be a valid cause for immune dysfunction.  

I'll talk more in my next post about one of the side effects of allergies: bronchitis. Stay tuned.