Monthly Archives: May 2021

Can You Develop Allergies To Cats Later In Life?

Picture this. You are a cat person, and you grew up with cats as a child. Heck. You even have one in your house right now.

One evening after a long day at work, as you are cuddling your furry friend, you start sneezing, and your eyes start getting red.

You are worried. Can you develop allergies to cats later in life? You wonder.

Like food allergies, cat allergies can develop later in life, but you shouldn’t rush to concluding that you have the allergies.

The first thing you should do is visit an allergy clinic, and the allergist will do a skin or blood test to confirm that you are truly suffering from cat allergies.

How can you control allergies?

After the doctor has confirmed that you are suffering from cat allergies, you should develop ways to protect yourself from them. Luckily, there are plenty of ways you can do it, with the most popular ones being:

Using medications

There are plenty of medications you can use to control the symptoms:

Decongestants: Like the over-the-counter pseudoephedrine and other allergy drugs, decongestants contain Claritin, Allegra-D, and Zyrtec-D that come in handy at easing the allergy symptoms.

Antihistamines: The beauty of most antihistamines is they are available over the counter, so you can easily access them. The most popular options include: fexofenadine, loratadine, diphenhydramine, and azelastine.

Nasal steroid sprays: These are meant to ease the asthma symptoms brought about by the condition. The most popular steroid sprays you can use are: fluticasone, budesonide, and triamcinolone.

Allergy shots: Although, they aren’t the first line of cat allergy treatment options as they aren’t often effective and take longer to complete, they can be of great value to some people.

Reducing your exposure to cats

The other way you can control the cat allergy symptoms is by reducing your exposure to the cats. Some of the ways you can reduce your exposure to these felines include:

Don’t touch, hug or kiss the cats: Even if you are single and it’s only the cat you have with you, you should avoid hugging, touching, or kissing them regardless of the inclination.

Be cautious of your cat-loving friends: Since you are a cat person, you most likely have a couple of cat-loving friends, right? After confirming that you are suffering from cat allergies, you need to be cautious when interacting with them.

Even if they don’t come visiting with their cats, chances are they have cat dander on their clothes and luggage, and this can make you sick when you hug or get too close to them.

Have a separate room for the cat: If you are lucky to have a large house with many rooms, consider having a separate room for your cat. This will minimize the contact, and at the same time, it will be easy to clean for the cat.

Get rid of the cat: If you aren’t too attached to the cat, you will be better off getting rid of the cat from your house. No, you don’t need to kill the cat. Instead, give the cat to a cat-loving person. The person can be your friend or even a family member. You only need to ensure they love cats and they will take good care of it.

If you don’t know a person that would love a cat in real life, there are plenty of online resources that help people swap cats and other pets, and you can use these to your advantage.

It will be painful to part with a loved one, but it will save you plenty and expensive trips to an allergy specialist Germantown MD seeking medications and consultations.

Does Exercise Help Asthma?

When many people have asthma, they rush to buy asthma medications or see the available asthma doctor. What they don’t realize is they can ease the symptoms by exercising.

Does exercise help asthma? When done right, it does ease the symptoms. The reason for this is because the exercises:

Reduce inflammation
Improve lung capacity
Increase endurance
Improve the cardiovascular fitness
Strengthen muscle

For best results, avoid exercising outdoors in frigid temperatures, as the low temperatures will worsen the condition. Some of the best asthma exercises that you can engage in include:

Indoor swimming

As much as you will be interacting with low water temperatures, swimming is one of the best asthma exercises you can engage in. It exerts fluid pressure on the chest, you have low pollen exposure, and you breathe in moist, warm air.

While swimming is a great exercise, you should be cautious as the chlorinated waters have been problematic for some people. If you aren’t used to swimming, take caution when you are getting in the waters as you might be allergic to the waters.

Diaphragmatic breathing

If you are into yoga or you don’t like engaging in strenuous exercises, you can engage in diaphragmatic breathing and other types of breathing exercises.

In diaphragmatic breathing, you need to learn how to breathe from the region around the diaphragm instead of from your chest. And by so doing, you strengthen your diaphragm, slow your breathing and decrease the body’s oxygen needs.

To practice diaphragmatic breathing, you need to lie on your back with your knees bent and the pillow under your knees. You can also opt to sit up straight on your chair. With one of your hands on your upper chest and the other on your stomach, breathe slowly through your nose.

While moving the hand on your stomach but keeping the one on your chest still, breathe slowly through your pursed lips. You should keep practising this technique until you can breathe in and out without moving your chest.

You can engage in other excellent breathing exercises such as: nasal breathing, Buteyko breathing, yoga breathing, and pursed-lip breathing.

Recreating biking

Do you love biking? You should pick up your bike and use it to leisurely bike around the estate. Since you are asthmatic, don’t exert a lot of pressure on it as it can worsen the situation. For best results, bike at a leisurely pace.

If it’s during the high pollen season, consider doing the biking when there isn’t a lot of pollen in the air. You can even do indoor cycling on a stationary bike so that you don’t come into contact with the annoying pollen.

Hiking

Hiking is another excellent exercise you can engage in but don’t do the hiking on a steep trail. The right way to go about it is to choose a relatively flat trail or a steady decline, then have fun.

Before you go out, first check the local pollen count and only proceed with hiking if the pollen levels are low.

Valuable tips for exercising with asthma

Use an inhaler before you exercise. The inhaled medications will relax the airways, making it easy for you to breathe during physical activity.

Warm-up and cool down. Before you begin the exercises, let the body adjust the exercise and when you are done with the exercise, gradually stop the activity.

When you are going outside, cover your nose and mouth with a mask or scarf. This is to prevent the dryness of the cool air from tightening your airways.

Finally, experts in allergy center Germantown MD recommend limiting your exposure to pollen and pollution as much as possible by exercising indoors or only going outside when the pollen count is low in the air.

What Causes Allergies to Develop?

If you recently visited an allergy clinic and were told that you are suffering from an allergy, you must wonder what causes allergies to develop, right?

Allergies come about when the body reacts to allergens. When the body comes into contact with the allergens, it produces special antibodies capable of recognizing the same allergic substances when the body comes into contact with it in the future.

In the event you come into contact with the allergen again, the body responds to the substance by causing a series of reactions that often involve blood vessel dilation, tissue destruction, and production of several inflammatory substances, including histamine.

Histamine is responsible for most classic allergy symptoms such as sneezing, sinus congestion, shortness of breath, watery eyes, headaches, nasal congestion, and hives.

Which are the common allergy triggers?

Although several allergens can bring about allergies, there are some that are more common than others. The common ones include:

Pollen

Pollen is the major cause of seasonal allergies. Different pollen from different plants cause allergies at different times of the year. For example, ragweed is responsible for allergic rhinitis that begins in late August and continues until the first frost.

Pollen from grasses such as red top, Bermuda, bluegrass, timothy, orchard, and others cause springtime allergies while pollen from trees such as birch, beech, oak, ash, sycamore, alder, and others bring about early springtime hay fever.

Mold spores

You can come across mold any time of the year, whether you spend most of the time indoors or outdoors. Common causes of outdoor mold are dead leaves and farm areas, while old books, bathrooms, and other damp areas are the leading causes of indoor mold.

Household allergens

Did you know your home has plenty of allergies that can worsen your allergies? The most common allergens are pet dander, dust, foods, and chemicals. These allergens often worsen the situation in winter when you keep the house closed most of the time. The situation is even worse if your house has poor ventilation.

How do you manage allergies?

Unless in severe cases, allergies are rarely life-threatening, but they can impact your life by decreasing your productivity, reducing your concentration in school, and due to the symptoms, you have a negative outlook on life. Due to this, you should move with haste and manage the condition before it brings your life to a halt.

There are plenty of ways you can control the condition, including:

Nasal sprays: These are medications that reduce the swelling in your nose, and from their name, you spray them into your nose. While they are great, they can be stuffy, runny, and itchy to the nose, so use them with caution.

Inhalers: You inhale these into your lungs to open the airways. There are primarily two types of inhalers that you can take: daily use and rescue inhalers. From their name, you take the daily inhalers during the allergy season to reduce the symptoms and the rescue inhalers when you are having an attack.

Prescription antihistamines: Although most of the antihistamines are now over the counter, you can still visit your allergy doctor Manassas VA, and he prescribes the antihistamines he deems right for your condition.

Allergy injections: You can still visit a clinic and have a series of injections meant to desensitize your immune system to the allergens that trigger the symptoms.

Immunotherapy: Here, you try to retrain the immune system to recognize the allergen and safe, and as a result, it doesn’t react to them. Even if the symptoms don’t go away completely, immunotherapy significantly reduces its frequency and severity.