Overview
Allergies and asthma have been noticed to be common in recent years due to many factors: increased prevalence of pollution, early use of antibiotics affecting gut’s flora, modernized life contributing to sedentary life style, and spending most of the time indoors reducing sunlight exposure leading to vitamin D deficiency. We thrive for excellence in our clinics and aim to serve our community by helping patients suspected to have allergies to confirm their diagnosis or rule it out.
The importance of allergy has been well established clinically lately. An informed clinician must consider allergy either independently or in combination with other medical conditions.
Foods avoided by patients represent foods the patient is allergic to. Unpleasant working environments may be places harboring elements the patient is allergic to. Poor performance at school might be caused by allergy. In case of food allergies, any organ might be a target and the symptoms will depend on the organ involved and unfortunately might progress to death rapidly. Concomitant reactions between aeroallergens and food allergens have been established in the last decade making allergies more complex.
In summary, any medical condition may be linked to allergy. Therefore, it might be wise to consider allergy when the results of our diagnostic approaches do not match our provisional diagnosis especially when there is strong family history of allergy.
Patient Care
In our clinics we manage patients with previous history of:
- Upper and lower airway inflammatory diseases e.g.: allergic rhinitis, non-allergic rhinitis, chronic rhinosinusitis, nasal polyposis, aspirin exacerbated respiratory disease and asthma.
- Allergic conjunctivitis.
- Food allergy.
- Drug allergy.
- Anaphylaxis: severe allergy caused by foods or drug.
We may offer:
- Immunotherapy.
- Food challenges and drug challenges.
We work with our colleagues in Pulmonary Medicine as a multidisciplinary team to make sure the patient’s asthma is controlled before doing skin tests, challenges or desensitization. The patient’s consultation starts by taking full detailed history, thorough physical examination and working hand by hand with the patient aiming for the goal of identifying offending aeroallergens, culprit drugs or foods suspected to be the cause of the patient’s complaints. Tests may include skin prick tests, blood tests, intradermal tests and challenges.
Accomplishments
- Skin Prick Test
Staff Members
- Dr. Nada Albahrani
- Dr. Nourah Almulhim
