I Am Not Giving My Child The Foods He/She Is Allergic To, Yet His/Her RAST Levels Continue To Rise. Why?

— -- Question: I am not giving my child the foods he/she is allergic to, yet his/her RAST levels continue to rise. Why?

Answer: This is an enormous source of frustration. And when we say RAST levels, what we're talking about is the level of allergic antibodies in their blood, so it's a measurement of specific IgE antibodies.

And in food allergy there is a natural course that the allergies take where most children will spend the first year-and-a-half or two, sometimes even three years, growing into the allergy and then, hopefully, will hit a peak in their allergy and begin to outgrow it.

So I warn everyone when I do their blood test when they're a year-and-a-half or two years old that it's likely to be worse than it was the time I did it before, when they were say nine or 12 months old. And that's just because of the natural course of that allergy and the way the immune system remembers the previous exposure and continues to produce these allergic antibodies even without that exposure.

We would recommend that you remain patient, that we continue to monitor those tests and hope that at some point we'll see them hit their peak and go down to a point where the allergy may eventually be outgrown.

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