Causes of Allergies and Diagnosis and Treatment

Abstract

Allergies are diseases of the immune system that cause an overreaction to substances called "allergens." Allergies are grouped by the kind of trigger, time of year or where symptoms appear on the body: indoor and outdoor allergies (also called "hay fever," "seasonal," "perennial" or "nasal" allergies), food allergies, latex allergies, insect allergies, skin allergies and eye allergies. People who have allergies can live healthy and active lives. The search strategy has been devised on ovid medline and then adapted for the other databases (see Additional file 1 for full search strategies). In all cases the databases will be searched from 1 January 2000 to 30 September 2012, and limited to Europe based on the definition provided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).The resulting quality assessment scores are given alongside other study parameters in three tables. We assessed the systematic reviews based on the type of intervention or subject assessed for the prevention of food allergy or food sensitization. In this overview of systematic reviews concerning the etiology and prevention of food allergy, we identified 14 eligible publications. This systematic review will provide the most up to date estimates of the frequency of food allergy in Europe. Given the presumed increase in IgE mediated food allergy in the recent past, there is much interest in identifying the causes of food allergy and primary preventive strategies. These advances are creating the opportunities for novel therapies for food allergy. However, at the current time, the only treatment is avoidance.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijls.v9i5.12701