Why Do Allergy Skin Prick and Blood Testing Results Sometimes Differ?

Image by Wolfgang Ihloff in Wikipedia For inhalant allergies, there is a high agreement (~80-90%) in results found between skin prick and blood testing . However, occasionally the results may differ quite significantly... usually in these situations, the skin prick test comes back positive for something whereas the blood test comes back negative or normal. It's also possible that both skin prick and blood testing may come back normal even if a patient is truly allergic. Why? Bef…

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Kim Kardashian Gets Allergy Testing

Celebrity Kim Kardashian of Keeping up with the Kardashians reality TV show underwent allergy testing with Dr. Mirmelli. Allergy testing was accomplished via skin prick (our office performs allergy testing by blood draw instead called immunocap ). She apparently was allergic to her pet cat... Kim apparently decided to let her pet cat Mercy go... a decision in contrast to what most cat-allergic people do. Watch the video .

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Skin Patch Immunotherapy for Allergy Cure

Over the years, there have been a variety of systems via which physicians and researchers have attempted to cure patients of their inhalant allergies. These include (click here for a description of each): • Allergy shots • Under the tongue allergy drops (SLIT) • Intra-Lymphatic Injections (ILIT) • Allergy Tablets • Epicutaneous Immunotherapy (EPIT) • Intra-Nasal Spray • Bronchial Inhalers Well... we can now add skin patches to the list. European researchers conducted a placeb…

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Different Types of Immunotherapy for Allergy Cure

Most people are already familiar with allergy shots and even sublingual (under the tongue) allergy drops as treatment to try and achieve cure (or tolerance) to the things they are allergic to. However, there are other forms of immunotherapy that may one day provide just as good if not better allergy cure rates. These include (most currently under research): - Intra-Lymphatic Injections (ILIT) : Rather than weekly shots in the arm, one research paper reported only 3 injections into a gro…

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Can A Person Have Allergies Even if Allergy Testing Comes Back Negative?

YES!!! But how can that be?!! Well, here is the simplified answer. When allergy testing is performed whether by skin prick or blood testing ( RAST ), one is testing to certain specific proteins known to cause allergic reactions in majority but not all patients (these are called major allergen). Patients need to remember that for a given allergy like CAT (or tree, mold, dust, etc)... there are millions of proteins (minor allergen) that have the potential to cause an allergic reaction in peo…

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A New Method of Allergy Testing (Multi-Array Chip Technology)

A MIT researcher has developed a new and possibly more accurate blood test for allergies using multi-array chip technology. The paper is titled " Multidimensional analysis of the frequencies and rates of cytokine secretion from single cells by quantitative microengraving " and is published in the journal Lab on a Chip. This chip technology uses a microscopic engraving process to create thousands to millions of tiny wells (or multi-array) on a chip where a different "blood tes…

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