Asthma or Allergy? Ask your Allergist!

Parents expecting their first babies, especially in their last trimester, start to wonder about the future health problems of their babies. Is my baby going to be allergic to milk? Will my child have asthma? Most people think asthma is caused by allergies in children. They are wrong. Sometimes allergy and asthma may have the same cause but other than this they are not correlated. Mold, dust mite and pet dander can cause allergies in the newborn babies.

They may also trigger asthma. These are environmental allergens. After children start to take solid food, food allergies may surface. The symptoms of allergies may be rash and itching on the skin, cold like disturbances, an upset stomach and on severe cases anaphylactic shock. Anaphylactic shock is a condition when bronchi in the lungs are constricted making it very hard to breath in.

Asthma also has similar symptoms. So it is not hard to understand why people think one is caused by the other. However asthma and allergies are treated very differently. If a person is in anaphylactic shock, a quick shot of epinephrine must be administered. If he or she is having an asthma crisis, a bronchodilator would ease the symptoms in the short run, sometimes saving the patients life. There is also a relevant and interesting statistics about these problems. 50 of people with asthma also have allergies. This means, if your child has one of these problems, the chance that he or she has the other is 50. If your baby is showing some or all of the symptoms we mentioned before, in order to find out what the problem really is, you must definitely take him or her to an allergist. There are very simple and painless tests to resolve the issue and prepare you and your child for the future.

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