29 March 2009DEFINING ALLERGY
‘Allergy’ means an abnormal, excessive reaction of the body’s defence systems to a substance absorbed from the environment. Allergies now affect 30-40 per cent of the population in the UK and are on the increase; the number of people going to their GPs for treatment for asthma and hay fever doubled in the 1980s. Asthma is responsible for up to 2000 deaths a year in the UK, and one in seven primary schoolchildren carries an inhaler.
There is much controversy over what allergy actually is. Historically, the definition is very broad, encompassing a wide range of illnesses brought about by people reacting to substances in their environment. By the 1960s, scientific research into the workings of the immune system had identified the mechanisms underlying most of the classic allergic diseases – asthma, eczema, hay fever, perennial rhinitis, urticaria, anaphylactic shock (>SYMPTOMS for full details). However, this research left unexplained many disorders that had hitherto come under the umbrella of allergy. Patients with these disorders have symptoms that are not typical of the classic allergic diseases – for example, they may have migraine, arthritis, muscle pains, irritable bowel syndrome, mood swings or other mental symptoms – and their symptoms are often highly variable and difficult to pin down to one specific cause. There is little solid scientific research into the underlying causes of such environmental illness or allergy.
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