Blood test for food allergies

[melted welly]

I know it’s a farming forum, not a health service, but has anyone had this done?

Our little boy has been at the allergy clinic since the age of 2, been on abstention diet of meat, fish, fruit and veg for the duration since (despite a bit of pressure to try scratch tests and eating trials) and he’s now almost 7.

On the last visit they took some blood to run tests on. Results back today, he’s still allergic to nuts.

Ok, great…… anything about the eggs, dairy, corn and others we discussed?

Oh no, that’s done thru eating trials.

We don’t really want to make him ill on purpose, especially going into winter, and have reservations on the scratch test doing more harm than good. In my head a blood test would be like a soil test, can add additional parameters, is it that straightforward? Can be done for nut allergy, can it be done for the others.

Has anyone done this privately?

 

[melted welly]

@ollie989898

resident medical professional??

 

[spin cycle]

@Izzybella_xxx

 

[Full of bull(s)]

My wife did one privately through a company in York I think. About £120 at the time, she had been suffering from a variety of intolerance symptoms, it was going to take years on the NHS. Pin pr*ck blood samples were sent, and in a week or so the results came back listing around a hundred different foods and any level of intolerance to them. Hers is a protein in milk which just started in her late thirties, it’s not lactose intolerance which she had already tried cutting out. All problems solved within a month. I will see if I can find out the name of the place

 

[melted welly]

My wife did one privately through a company in York I think. About £120 at the time, she had been suffering from a variety of intolerance symptoms, it was going to take years on the NHS. Pin pr*ck blood samples were sent, and in a week or so the results came back listing around a hundred different foods and any level of intolerance to them. Hers is a protein in milk which just started in her late thirties, it’s not lactose intolerance which she had already tried cutting out. All problems solved within a month. I will see if I can find out the name of the place

That’d be great thank you.

 

[Full of bull(s)]

Homepage

YorkTest is an award-winning food intolerance & allergy testing company, optimising health and wellbeing with our range of health tests. Order online...

www.yorktest.com

 

[Frodo]

I am mildly allergic to a range of foods, most of which make my lip swell or give me a rash (mono sodium glutamate is pretty evil stuff). I grew up on a fruit farm eating ad-lib strawberries for 6 weeks possibly caused it.

As a child it was worse and we did the skin pr*ck tests, but they didn’t find anything specific. (House dust I seem to remember, which was pretty

in my twenties I had a blood test which I think was fairly new at the time. It came back with such a wide list of foods that l was intolerant to that to avoid them all would be difficult/impossibleMy experience is that it is also a slightly moving target and tollerance to certain foods can improve.

I do remember shell fish as being on the list, which was not a problem as I’m not much of a fish fan. That said on a recent holiday I decided to try lobster and was violently sick, so the test was accurate on that one.

so the blood test was definitely worth doing, but my experience twenty years ago was to use it as a guide rather than being transformational.

obviously techniques will have improved over time but I don’t think there have been any revolutions.

Personally with antihistamine tablets and moderation I can manage it and as I get older it affects me less.

Obviously every case will be different and hope your son is Ok

 

[melted welly]

I am mildly allergic to a range of foods, most of which make my lip swell or give me a rash (mono sodium glutamate is pretty evil stuff). I grew up on a fruit farm eating ad-lib strawberries for 6 weeks possibly caused it.

As a child it was worse and we did the skin pr*ck tests, but they didn’t find anything specific. (House dust I seem to remember, which was pretty

in my twenties I had a blood test which I think was fairly new at the time. It came back with such a wide list of foods that l was intolerant to that to avoid them all would be difficult/impossibleMy experience is that it is also a slightly moving target and tollerance to certain foods can improve.

I do remember shell fish as being on the list, which was not a problem as I’m not much of a fish fan. That said on a recent holiday I decided to try lobster and was violently sick, so the test was accurate on that one.

so the blood test was definitely worth doing, but my experience twenty years ago was to use it as a guide rather than being transformational.

obviously techniques will have improved over time but I don’t think there have been any revolutions.

Personally with antihistamine tablets and moderation I can manage it and as I get older it affects me less.

Obviously every case will be different and hope your son is Ok

Thanks for the reply.

He’s fine really, he’s a solid, happy, bouncy 6yr old boy who really likes his food. The food intolerances have actually given him a pretty mature head on young shoulders as he likes to be in charge of it.

I was mulling over a fruit roll thing he asked about in the shop on Sunday and reading the ingredients out loud. When I came to ascorbic acid he took it out of my hand and put it back on the shelf with a little sigh.

He was born a bit early, in December when there was a lot of coughs and sneezes about and ended up having 3 different courses of antibiotics in his first 6weeks, we think that may have been the cause for him. Altered his gut biome, plus we understand some of the antibiotics may use egg protein as carriers and his body probably identified them as allergens as it encountered them first via the bloodstream and not the gut. We had hoped that keeping a very plain, whole food abstention diet going until this time of his life would give his system time to reset/forget.

Want to try blood tests just as an entry point as the tests are done out-with his body and won’t affect him. We got a bit of fright early on, as when it became apparent he was intolerant to dairy, we tried “alternative milks” and pistachio nut “milk” put him in intensive care for a week. So a blood test just to provide a bit of guidance is all we’re after really.

It would be great if he could grow out of the egg and dairy intolerances at least.

The need to check ingredients really opened our eyes to the level of processing involved in some of the mass produced food products.

 

[davidroberts30]

@mtx.jag

 

[mtx.jag]

@mrs mtx

 

[mrs mtx]

@mrs mtx

I love how you can’t answer this

 

[mrs mtx]

Sorry I’ve just seen this!

we have an 8 year old with multiple non ige allergies and an allergy called fpies, still suffers with chronic reflux and today they’ve said they think he has an obstructed bowel so that’s going to be fun

we’ve never successfully had bloods done, it’s always been food trials which suck. I completely get where you’re coming from with an old head on your shoulders. I would trust Rhys to go anywhere and he’d check ingredients before eating anything!

 

[manhill]

A shot in the dark:
Son in Law has developed gluten intolerence. He seems to react to miniscule amounts. With that level of sensitivity I wondered if combining wheat would throw up dust containing gluten that could find its way into the digestive tract. Haven't heard of this kind of problem for operators any ideas?

 

[orchard]

I know it’s a farming forum, not a health service, but has anyone had this done?

Our little boy has been at the allergy clinic since the age of 2, been on abstention diet of meat, fish, fruit and veg for the duration since (despite a bit of pressure to try scratch tests and eating trials) and he’s now almost 7.

On the last visit they took some blood to run tests on. Results back today, he’s still allergic to nuts.

Ok, great…… anything about the eggs, dairy, corn and others we discussed?

Oh no, that’s done thru eating trials.

We don’t really want to make him ill on purpose, especially going into winter, and have reservations on the scratch test doing more harm than good. In my head a blood test would be like a soil test, can add additional parameters, is it that straightforward? Can be done for nut allergy, can it be done for the others.

Has anyone done this privately?

NHS Wales: we were restricted to five or seven elements to test. There were at least two egg options, probably three (yolk/white/combined) iirc. Because there were several severe allergens at play, our consultant got us to perform an external touch skin test on a sensitive area that could be isolated and cleaned thoroughly whilst avoiding ingestion like the back of the neck where hives would become apparent within five to ten minutes. Having moved, current consultant reckons that one should go straight to a taste test. No chance we would do that with a history of anaphylaxis.
Clinical pr*ck tests are a quick useful tool to check response, but hard to quantify, and they tend to have limited elements.
It's very difficult to isolate what's causing a particular reaction when there are lots of allergens. I'm not a medic, but looking at that large range you've listed i'd consider histamine as a potential cause. Our daughter has severe allergies to milk, egg, beef, lamb and pollen. She also reacted to histamine too for quite a few years, and has now thankfully grown out of it, but that reaction ensured we had to avoid cosmetics/spices/berries/peas&beans/spinach/tomatoes and a few other things.