Allergy symptoms

[karlashannon06]

My daughter was diagnosed with a dairy allergy just before her second birthday, she is now 6years old. At our last appointment it wS advised as she was doing really well to try to re introduce dairy back into her diet, so we started the Dairy Challenge. We did this slowly over a 30 day period. She coped really well and finally could eat, what she called 'normal food'.
After a month or so of doing really well we started having tummy cramps again. They were getting progressively worse and other things started happening! She started getting the terrible shakes, starting in her hands then her whole body, she then hot the cold sweats, this would last for a couple of days. The worst this was she started passing out, didn't last for long and she came round quickly but was quite distraught after!
I decided to take her off dairy again! The cramps stopped, the shakes stopped and the sweating stopped, coincidence!! Have taken her to GP but symptoms unknown, blood pressure checked, blood sugars checked, all normal at that time.
Help!! Any ideas would be grateful received. Next appointment with consultant is not till middle May.
Thanks in advance.
Claire

[Dr Helen Brough]

Dear Claire,

It is possible that the tummy cramps, shakes and cold sweats came on coincidentally after reintroducing cow's milk back into the diet, perhaps because of an intercurrent viral illness. On the other hand it is possible that your daughter was displaying symptoms of delayed gastrointestinal food allergy to cow's milk. From your post I gather that you daughter did not have any symptoms of immediate allergy (hives, swelling etc). If she did not have any of these immediate symptoms then I would suggest that you could retry dairy again (once your daughter is feeling better), but stick to heated forms of cow's milk first (baked cow's milk in cakes and biscuits). Extensive heating of cow's milk reduces its allergic potency.Once your duaghter is able to tolerate baked/heated cow's milk for a few months, then you could move onto less processed forms of cow's milk like butter gradually and monitor her for any symptoms that you described.

In delayed gastrointestinal food allergy there is classically a threshold level at which the body tolerates the allergen and then above this threshold may start having problems. The key is to increase the dosing gradually (over several months) so that you can detect the threshold level and avoid having lots of symptoms by inadvertently have too much of the allergen. If your appointment with a Consultant also has a dietitian it would be good to discuss this with them also.

I hope this is helpful.

Dr Helen Brough
Consultant in Paediatric Allergy