allergy question

[Anonymous]

Can someone please help me understand- if the Alimentum is milk based and Seth does ok with it, does that rule out a milk allergy for him or are the proteins so broken down that it would not trigger a response even if there was an allergy? Are there any babies out there that did ok on Alimentum only later to be diagnosed with an allergy? I am still trying to wrap my brain around this intolerance vs. allergy thing.

[Anonymous]

Kaelyn did well on Nutramigen. Well, we thought that she was doing fine. Looking back there were some signs of her allergy. She had eczema, dark rings under her eyes, a red ring on her bottom, and she was slightly constipated. However, all of those symptoms were very sporadic and didn’t usually happen at the same time, so we never made the connection to an allergy. She also did fairly well with dairy products (although the rash got worse as time went on). Once she started drinking whole milk, we finally figured out that she was having major allergy issues.

[Anonymous]

It sure is confusing isn’t it? I’m avoiding allergy testing like the plague because I just don’t think it’s 100%. There is too much risk of a false positive and/or false negative. I personally think that if he’s tolerating Alimentum and there are no signs of an allergy, it’s a good indicator that he’ll tolerate milk at some point. We had a lot of issues with whole milk and whole milk yogurt. After a couple of months off of dairy, we started back in with cheese and hidden dairy and have now introduced reduced fat milk and reduced fat yogurt and she’s doing very good with these. The problems we were seeing with whole milk and whole milk yogurt aren’t there (severe diaper rashes for the most part).

Do you have plans to see an Allergist? What does the Ped or Ped GI say?

[Anonymous]

Thanks, GI seems to think he is not allergic since he is on Alimentum and thinks it is more of a protein sensitivity that he will outgrow…I am just praying he is right! We are trialing rice milk now and if all goes well for a few weeks, then we are suppossed to test cheese and whole milk. I guess I am just trying to see what kind of odds we have.

Seth does have rings under his eyes- everyone always comments how tired he must be when we are out. He also has the red ring on his bottom but when I pointed it out to his ped., she told me it was just diaper rash.

We were scheduled to see an allergist but had to cancel and now based on what GI says, we are going to hold off rescheduling until we see how the milk trials go.

It is all sooo confusing!!

[Anonymous]

He’s only a little over a year, so there’s a good chance that it’s only an intolerance. Personally, I’d push for the allergy testing. I know that it’s not totally accurate when they are this young. However, if it is an allergy then the sooner that you remove the allergen from his diet, the better chance he has of outgrowing the allergy. You could ask to just do the RAST test. Having blood drawn isn’t fun, but it isn’t too bad. The RAST test tends toward false negatives. Usually if it shows up positive, it’s definitely an allergy. So, if you do the test and it shows up that he has an allergy, you’ll be able to start dealing with it. If it shows up negative, you can either move on to the skin test or decide to wait for a while and see if he outgrows it.

[Anonymous]

It’s so interesting how varying opinions are about the RAST testing. I always thought that there was a higher chance of false positives with RAST over skin prick testing.

[Anonymous]

That is really weird! Our allergist said that he felt so confident in the RAST positive that he didn’t do the skin prick test on wheat or milk since they were positive with the blood test.

[Author]

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