BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Natural rubber latex is the most important occupational allergen among medical workers, and remains a significant occupational health issue in Taiwan. We conducted this large-scale hospital-based screening study to understand the incidence of latex allergy and latex sensitization among medical workers in Taiwan over the past 5 years. METHODS 1253 medical workers were en...

BACKGROUND Skin prick tests (SPT) are widely used both in clinical diagnostics and in research. The standardization of allergen extracts is well documented to be crucial for the validity of SPT, whereas less emphasis has been placed on reproducibility and the SPT procedure itself. The objectives of this study are to clarify how the double skin prick test procedure influence the sensitivity and ...

AIM Several studies have shown a negative correlation between cancer and atopy-related diseases. There are also a few reports of a positive relationship. We wanted to further evaluate these relationships in a prospective study. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The incidence of malignant diseases among adult patients with atopy-related diseases (asthma, rhinitis, urticaria, eczema etc; n = 13811), who had...

BACKGROUND Less than 10% of pancreatic cancer cases survive 5 years, yet its etiology is not well understood. Studies suggest allergies are associated with reduced pancreatic cancer risk. Our study collected additional information on allergies (including skin prick test results and differentiation of allergic/nonallergic asthma), and is the first to assess possible confounding by allergy medica...

The pathogenetic mechanism of nasal polyps remains unknown, although allergy has been cited as an important factor in the etiology of nasal polyposis. Currently there is no definite histological criterion for differentiation of allergic from inflammatory nasal polyp. However, in a few studies, tissue eosinophil count has been used for this. This study aimed to find out the agreement rate of ski...

Iran is the main producer of Saffron in the world and a great number of Khorasan (the largest province of Iran) are involved in growing this plant. Recently, saffron pollen has found great importance due to inducing allergic reactions. In this study, the prevalence and clinical symptoms of saffron pollen allergy and specific IgE level in saffron workers have been studied. For this purpose, 167 ...

The aim of this study was to evaluate rhinomanometric responses to nasal allergen provocation in children with allergic rhinitis sensitized to house dust mite. We studied 51 children, aged 6-16 years (mean: 11.5 +/- 2.6 years), with clinical symptoms of perennial allergic rhinitis without asthma and 20 non-atopic healthy controls in the same age range (mean: 11.8 +/- 3.8 years). All of the pati...

INTRODUCTION Allergic rhinitis (AR) is a prevalent disease worldwide but is still underdiagnosed in many parts of Asia. We studied the clinical profiles of AR patients in our community based on the new ARIA classification and investigated the aetiological allergens using a skin prick test. MATERIALS AND METHODS In 2008, 142 newly diagnosed patients with AR were seen and underwent skin prick t...

BACKGROUND Synthetic contiguous overlapping peptides (COPs) may represent an alternative to allergen extracts or recombinant allergens for allergen specific immunotherapy. In combination, COPs encompass the entire allergen sequence, providing all potential T cell epitopes, while preventing IgE conformational epitopes of the native allergen. METHODS Individual COPs were derived from the sequen...