Food allergy/intolerance tests

Food allergy tests seem highly unreliable:

What tests do people use to test food alergies/intolerances? What about other allergies?

Blood tests are the way to go, Igg based. ELISA and MELISA can be useful too. Skin patch tests are useless.

Easiest food intolerance test is your heart rate, which will spike when you eat food you are allergic to. About 20bpm change shortly after eating!

Any specific tests you suggest? I think someone at AHS was suggesting the Cyrex labs tests for gluten sensitivity.

Food allergy is an abnormal response to a food, triggered by the body’s immune system. There are several types of immune responses to food. The information on this Web site focuses on one type of adverse reaction to food, in which the body produces a specific type of antibody, called immunoglobulin E (IgE).

I agree with you about the value of the IgG blood test, and did agree about the uselessness of the IgE (skin prick) test–that is, until I took it. It identified another set of foods, and removing those foods relieved a different set of symptoms, ones that had not gone away when I removed just the IgG allergens.

Measuring pulse is a very good way to detect food allergies, as I discovered quite by accident when I got myself a snack in the middle of a day of monitoring pulse. There is a book, The Pulse Test, now out of print but available used, that outlines the method. The quick synopsis is: measure resting pulse before getting out of bed to get a baseline, then measure just before eating, and 30, 6o, 90 minutes after eating. An allergic food will raise my pulse by at least 10 beats per minute. And I don’t know how common this is, but it also frequently causes skipped beats.

Using the pulse test, I identified many foods that had not shown up on the IgG blood test. They did show up, years later, on the IgE skin prick test.

LauraG

immunolabs.com IgG food sensitivity testing
immunoscienceslab.com
Yorkallergyusa.com

I have no evaluated or tried these. They were links found in the Textbook of Functional Medicine.

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"Sera from 78 patients with GS and 80 patients with celiac disease were retrospectively assessed for immunoglobulin (Ig)G/IgA antigliadin antibodies (AGA), IgG deamidated gliadin peptide antibodies (DGP-AGA), IgA tissue transglutaminase antibodies (tTGA), and IgA endomysial antibodies (EmA)…

IgG AGA were positive in 56.4% of GS patients…
The serological pattern of GS is characterized by IgG AGA positivity in more than half of cases associated to IgA AGA in a few patients, but without EmA, tTGA, and DGP-AGA, which are the specific markers of celiac disease."

The research only compares people with symptoms (Gluten sensitivity and Celiac disease). I presume this would be a better study if they had compared the sera of people without gluten intolerance to those with GS and those with a proven celiac diagnosis.

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This article does a better job at discussing IgG AGA than the first.

“There is laboratory evidence. Patients with GS are always anti-tTG-negative and EMA-negative. In 40–50% of cases, IgG-type AGA or IgA-type AGA may present, and only 50% of patients carry the HLA-DQ2 or DQ8 haplotype. That which characterizes such patients, how- ever, is that they do not show histological alterations in the small intestine upon biopsy, but at the most there is a positive increment of intrahepatic CD3 lymphocytes, albeit in a smaller amount than in CD (Marsh 0–1).”

Email me mmaloof at gmail.com if you would like my help in this sort of research or if you need any labs ordered. I am a licensed CA physician.

The book on the pulse test mentioned previously is available free online and it is quite interesting:

http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020108.coca.pdf

Joyce

IgE Skin test, Challenge test and blood test are the most common methods of allergy test usually done by different labs. The tests are undoubtedly expensive so you can get it done through sites like teddy can that gives discount on allergy test. A Radioallergosorbent test (RAST) is a special blood test used to determine the substances a subject is allergic to. This is not similar to a skin allergy test that determines allergy by reaction of a person’s skin to different substances.