ADHD and Allergies
Posted By Vic on March 1, 2010
Allergies do cause ADD and ADHD symptoms in some people. These can be as unusual as tomato allergy or yeast allergy. If an allergy is the cause of ADHD behavior, then there is no ADHD after all.
The reason allergies are very controversial in the ADHD community is because the symptoms can appear sporadically. Food allergies are too complicated to be tested the way they are in ADHD tests. To find out if a child has an allergy, a standard allergy test is OK. But it is a very different matter to test if, when and how these allergies cause ADHD behavior.
There is a threshold level, below which the child does not react. This can fluctuate with the mood the child is in, its state of health, any deficiency in some significant nutrient or because of hormones, these changes making the child more, or less, sensitive. These thresholds vary from day to day and even within a day.
There is the add-on effect as well. The child may eat sweets with food colorants and not respond this time. Yet next time the child might eat the same number of sweets after eating a peanut butter sandwich, and the combined effect is a hyperactive reaction.
This is one of the reasons a parent can say something affects their child and be correct, despite of the lack of “scientific proof,” because the parent experiences the real life child. Observant parents are more likely to be able to find what is upsetting their children than clinical test.
The clinical test is necessary to confirm any suspicions.
However, there are different types of food allergy. The immediate ot type 1 allergy is easily recognized because of the quick and dramatic symptoms. Hay fever is the most common type 1 allergy and can be diagnosed by allergy skin tests. Some food allergiesare also type 1 and show up on skin tests.
The second type is the delayed patterns food allergies, which are not so obvious and generally go unrecognized. Allergy skin tests, also referred to as an “IgE” response, do not show this allergic reaction. Symptoms are delayed many hours after eating foods and chronic disease is often the result. To spot this we need to know ourselves and our children.
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