TUESDAY, Dec. 7 (HealthDay News) -- The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has released guidelines for the diagnosis and management of food allergy, providing health care professionals with recommendations for identifying and treating individuals with food allergies. These guidelines have been published in the December issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
The report focuses on "best practice" clinical guidelines for the diagnosis and management of food allergy based on a comprehensive review and objective evaluation of the recent scientific and clinical literature. The guidelines outline diseases defined as food allergy, including both IgE-mediated reactions to food and some non-IgE-mediated reactions to food. However, the guidelines do not address celiac disease or the management of patients with food allergy outside of clinical care settings or the related public health policy issues.
The newly established guidelines are intended to aid clinical practitioners in making appropriate management decisions regarding patient care among those with food allergies. The expert panel that developed the guidelines defined food allergy as an adverse health effect arising from a specific immune response that occurs reproducibly on exposure to a given food, which they used as a basis for their recommendations. The guidelines discuss the epidemiology of food allergies, risk factors for food allergies, and diagnosis and management strategies for individuals with food allergies, both fatal and nonfatal.
"Health care professionals should take these guidelines into account when exercising their clinical judgment. However, this guidance does not override their responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient, guardian, or caregiver. Clinical judgment on the management of individual patients remains paramount," write the authors of the report.
Several authors disclosed financial relationships with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and/or hold patents related to food allergy.
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