Allergy & Asthma Related Articles & Blog Posts

Most of us spend the vast majority of each day indoors, where air quality can be 2-5 times worse than outside. Indoor air quality issues revolve around environmental contaminants such as allergens and airborne chemicals.

One of the most exciting reports I have ever read, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk – What We Can Do Now, was released this week by the President’s Cancer Panel, along with significant coverage by Nicholas Kristof in The NY Times, Lyndsey Layton in The Washington Post and Liz Szabo in USA Today.

Parents are often surprised when I tell them that a great number of the products we use in our homes are not necessarily evaluated and declared safe by a government entity. The paints that cover your walls, the stain-resistant fabric that covers your furniture, the very carpet under your feet… these things can contain toxic [...]

Getting plenty of DHA, one of the important omega-3 fats found in breast milk, could help to prevent allergies, asthma, and eczema in young children. Dr. Eileen Birch, who has previously studied links between DHA and improved mental and visual development, followed 89 formula-fed children who received formula with or without DHA included.

Get ready for some surprising recommendations. Eczema, asthma, and food allergies are all on the rise in children, each having more than doubled in the last several decades. This rapid increase has lead to many differing recommendations on the timing and selection of foods offered to babies, to err on the side of caution before [...]

Regular contact with farm animals is associated with a dramatically lower risk of a young child’s later developing an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) such as Crohn disease (CD) or ulcerative colitis (UC), according to a fascinating study in the August 2007 Pediatrics.

What happens when women with asthma get pregnant? Does their asthma get better or worse? Should they use more asthma medicines when pregnant? Or less? How does the asthma itself affect their babies? The current state of evidence appears in the January 2005 Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Asthma is more common in pregnant [...]

Asthma in children is increasing around the globe. It’s not unusual for it to be a country’s number one reason for a child to be hospitalized. Researchers from Australia (a continent where asthmais the leading cause of childhood hospitalization) have completed an important, long study.

Changes in the home environment can be as powerful as medications in treating asthma, according to an exciting study in the September 9, 2004 New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers in the Inner-City Asthma Study Group followed almost 1,000 elementary school children with allergic asthma severe enough to require at least one hospitalization or two [...]

Could it be that how you clean or how you decorate your home might influence whether your child develops asthma? Could the smell of new wall-to-wall carpets be linked to asthma risk? A provocative study in the September 2004 issue of Thorax suggests there is a strong connection. Researchers from Australia analyzed air quality inside [...]