Allergy & Asthma Related Articles & Blog Posts

The longer that children breastfeed, the less likely they are to wheeze when they reach their first birthdays, according to a study published in the October 2003 Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

A simple flu shot for every child with asthma could prevent 100,000 hospitalizations this year in the U.S. alone, according to an analysis by the American Lung Association released on September 18, 2003. Sadly, last year 90 percent of children with asthma and 61 percent of adults with asthma missed the opportunity to get the [...]

Because allergies to pets are common, people long assumed that exposure to pets made allergies more likely. A number of studies have turned this assumption upside down. The August 2003 Pediatrics Synopsis Book summarizes the current understanding.

Introduction to wheezing: Our airways are designed to be responsive to harmful substances in the air. If we walk through clouds of smoke, our airways will shrink, protecting our delicate lung tissues from the noxious ingredients in the smoke. They should return to normal when we begin to breathe fresh air. Some people – those [...]

Related concepts: Food hypersensitivity, Oral allergy syndrome, Allergic proctocolitis Introduction to food allergies: Many parents of infants and toddlers are told that food allergies don’t happen that young, or that they are very rare. We’ve learned that food allergies certainly do happen and that they are common – affecting about 1 in 18 children before [...]

Introduction to cough: Your home calms at night, the children are tucked into bed – but then loud coughing replaces the silence. It’s impressive that a body so small can cough so loud. What is a cough? Coughing is an important part of the body’s defense system. It forcefully propels unwanted invaders up and out [...]

Related concepts: Reactive airway disease, wheezy bronchitis, viral-associated wheezing, bronchiolitis Introduction to asthma: Asthma is one of the most common disorders affecting children. As many as 10 percent of children have some degree of asthma, and the number has been rising steadily since about 1980. Thankfully, advances in the diagnosis and treatment of asthma have [...]

Our understanding of allergies continues to change. Evidence continues to mount that some allergies may be connected to overly clean environments (the “hygiene hypothesis”). 

We’ve known for awhile that when mothers have asthma (or related conditions such as eczema and hay fever) breast feeding for at least 4 to 6 months will lower the risk of her child developing asthma.

What do Glenn Close, Minnie Driver, Funkmaster Flex, Whoopi Goldberg, Jeff Goldblum, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Kelsey Grammer, Shaquille O’Neal, Gwyneth Paltrow, Diane Sawyer, and General Schwarzkopf all have in common? This cast of stars provides the voices for Quest For The Code, an exciting new computer game by Steven Spielberg’s Starbright Foundation “dedicated to the [...]