Breathe Easy During Allergy Season

Tips For Breathing Easy During Allergy Season

• Avoid common allergens.

• If you are allergic to shellfish, don’t eat it.

• If cats make you break out in hives, don’t pet them or keep them in your home.

• Try to avoid the outdoors on windy days or when you begin to notice symptoms. The wind often stirs up pollen and carries it through the air.

• Do not cut grass or be near someone mowing their lawn. Mowing stirs up pollen and molds.

• Avoid high pollen exposure times at dawn and dusk.

• Keep car windows closed when you drive. It is also a good idea to use an air conditioner at home.

• Don’t hang laundry out to dry because pollen and molds can collect on sheets and clothes. 

Is it rising temperatures, blooming flowers, and the smell of freshly mowed grass that signal summer or your hay fever, congestion, and itchy eyes? If you’re one of the 35 million Americans who suffer from allergies, you know the warmer weather is a warning that allergy season is here.

Although most people suffering allergies are able to handle their conditions with advice from their doctor, they must take extra precautions during the height of allergy season to avoid severe reactions. Increasing your allergy IQ could help prevent you or a loved one from requiring emergency care for allergy-related attacks.

To help improve your allergy IQ, the following advice is offered for allergy sufferers:

Visit your doctor regularly — The continuing advice of a doctor is crucial to the long-term treatment of allergy-related conditions. Your doctor may recommend drug therapies or allergy shots. An allergy specialist can also help ensure that therapies are not misused.

Avoid the allergen — See the above tips.

Antihistamines — These drugs are the mainstay of treatment for allergies. Used properly, antihistamines can prevent an allergic reaction from happening, or reduce the symptoms should a reaction occur. In the past, most antihistamines caused drowsiness. Today, your doctor might be able to prescribe an antihistamine for you that is effective in treating your allergies and does not cause drowsiness.

Allergy shots — Administered by a doctor, these shots change a person’s reaction to an allergen. The shots contain extracts from allergens and are given in slowly increasing doses until a person can tolerate enough of the allergen to be free of allergy symptoms. About 85% of allergy patients report improvement in their conditions after allergy shots.

Go to the emergency department if you have severe sweating, faintness, nausea, panting, rapid pulse rate and pale, cold, moist skin —These are symptoms of an intense allergic reaction and require immediate medical attention. Blood pressure could plummet to levels far below normal and you could become drowsy and confused or lose consciousness.

Allergies and Asthma — People with asthma sometimes find that their symptoms worsen with allergy season. Asthma is a disease of the airway tubes that lead to the lungs, and can be worsened by the same allergic reactions that people without asthma get. Studies show that 90 percent of asthmatics under the age of 30 also suffer from allergies. Since many of the symptoms of this disease are the same as they are for allergies, physicians use some of the same therapies for both.