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Allergies Allergy Treatment

Allergy Shots: How Does Immunotherapy Work?

Summary & Participants

Immunotherapy is one of the most effective treatments available to allergy sufferers. Learn how allergy shots work and who should and should not get them.

Medically Reviewed On: July 01, 2008

Webcast Transcript

MARJORIE SLANKARD, MD: There are certain patients who may have cardiovascular disease, who are on a medication like a beta blocker or who have some other general, severe systemic illness where we may not recommend that they go on a program of allergy shots.

GILLIAN SHEPHERD, MD: We generally don't give them if the patient is very elderly. They may be managed by medication. The only hesitation in some physicians is to not give them to patients who have something really wrong with their immune system, certain diseases. There's actually no evidence that allergy shots cause any problem with the immune system, but there sometimes is hesitancy about that.

ANNOUNCER: One thing to remember about allergy shots is that they are very specifically targeted treatments.

GILLIAN SHEPHERD, MD: If you get allergy shots for cat, the mechanism of giving you the injections on a regular basis is settling down your immune system but only for it's over-reactivity to cat. It doesn't affect any other part of the immune system. The treatment is very safe; it's been done for more than 50 years now and granted the materials are always tuned up and changing a little bit. But as far as its effect, it's extremely safe.

ANNOUNCER: Throughout much of the world, allergies and asthma are on the rise. Within the medical community, there are several theories about why this is happening.

MARJORIE SLANKARD, MD: One of these is due to, we think, diesel fuel. Another may be that we live in a more sterile environment.

GILLIAN SHEPHERD, MD: It's called the so-called hygiene hypothesis. Which means we live in too-clean an environment. And what it turns out is that at one point in the immune system, which is this giant roadmap, there's a Y fork in the road. And one fork in the immune system goes off to fight infections. And if it's not busy off fighting infections, it defaults automatically to this fork. This fork has a lot of functions, but one of it is to go and produce allergies. Now if this fork is off fighting infections-nowadays we're bringing up our kids in a clean world. They get fewer diseases, they're vaccinated for a lot of things, we have antibiotics. So it turns out this fork of the immune system is not getting stimulated as much as it used to. And therefore it seems to default over to this side, which makes allergies.

BETH CORN, MD: I think the biggest theory is recognition. So what might have been termed a severe cold twenty years ago that lingered, is now attributed to allergies. What might have been termed bronchitis, is now termed asthma.

ANNOUNCER: With a growing awareness of allergy all over the world, allergy sufferers can now find an effective treatment regimen to keep their symptoms under control.

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