With more pollen in the air, you might be battling symptoms like itchy and watery eyes, sneezing or a runny nose. Professor Janet Davies from the Queensland university of Technology discusses what triggers an allergy and how to treat it.
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00:00Well, it happens when your immune system becomes sensitized to things that are normally harmless
00:07and your body then makes a particular type of antibodies we call IgE.
00:12If you've got those antibodies to something that you're allergic to, like pollens, then
00:19you can subsequently have an allergic reaction and that's the mast cells inside your body
00:25that is firing off histamine and other inflammatory mediators.
00:31What are the most common and effective treatments?
00:35So obviously the antihistamine is one of the mediators.
00:39If histamine is one of the mediators, sorry, then taking antihistamine can help relieve
00:44symptoms and most people will reach for the antihistamines.
00:49But in fact, if you've got moderate to severe allergies, including hay fever, then you
00:55really want to be controlling the underlying inflammation that's driving that, which means
01:00you should be looking at using an intranasal corticosteroid, for instance.
01:05So I recommend people who are having troubles with the hay fever that they talk to their
01:10pharmacist and if they need to, go and see their general practitioner for a proper assessment
01:16testing and possibly a referral to a specialist.
01:19Is there anything that people can do to relieve seasonal allergies permanently?
01:25There is a treatment that provides long-term protection and that is allergen immunotherapy
01:32and that is initiated by an allergy specialist where you can receive small doses and increasing
01:39levels to become training your immune system not to fire off, to train your immune system
01:45to tolerate the allergens that you're allergic to.
01:49I know that food allergies around the world are on the rise.
01:54Is that the case too for spring or seasonal allergies as well?
01:58Yes, unfortunately is, particularly in Australia.
02:02So the 2022 National Health Survey showed that we had a one point, sorry, one point,
02:09sorry, it's Sunday morning, I'm getting all my words mixed up.
02:13We've got a one and a half fold increase.
02:15So three times as many people with hay fever from 2001 to 2022.
02:22So around 23.8% of people report having hay fever in Australia at the moment, which is
02:29a high burden.
02:30That's almost, you know, one in four people.
02:34And when we talk about, you know, itchy and watery eyes or runny nose, it might seem trivial.
02:39But for someone who works with people who have these seasonal allergies, how debilitating
02:44can they be for people?
02:46Look, they have a significant effect on your health and your quality of life.
02:51And people will often trivialise hay fever, but it is associated with other conditions,
02:58respiratory allergic conditions like having asthma, like having sleep apnea, ear infections.
03:07It can affect the quality of your sleep and the performance of your when you're working
03:13or when you're at school.
03:14So it's not an insignificant problem.
03:18And it's one that really you should pay attention to and see if you can talk to your pharmacist
03:24in the first instance, perhaps if you can't get to see a doctor or a specialist.
03:29But if you have troubling symptoms that bother you a lot, then you really should try and
03:35see a medical professional and get that properly diagnosed and managed.