If the pollen season is over and you are still suffering, mold may be the culprit. While indoor mold can grow year around, outdoor mold has a typical season that begins in the late winter or spring rain that and finally declines in the late fall. Because of this long season of exposure, many patients experience frequent or chronic sinus or ear infections.

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Symptoms

While mold exposure is universal, your symptoms depend on your sensitivity to mold, your exposure to mold, and whether you may be sensitive to other allergens. Mold allergy symptoms include: allergic rhinitis, asthma, and hives. Many patient suffer from delayed symptoms such as chronic congestion, recurrent sinusitis, eczema, headache, malaise, and fatigue.

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Mold Testing  

Diagnosing mold allergy can be very complicated because the symptoms can be very dependent on the patient and can look extremely different from one person to the next. To complicate things further, it is rare to find a patient with just one mold allergy. It is common for a patient to have allergies to several kinds of mold, with one mold allergy a lot worst that others. One day a patient might experience one set of symptoms, and the next day another.

Testing for mold allergy is difficult, especially when using skin testing, because many individuals do not have an immediate reaction to mold. For example, a patient may be exposed to mold on Monday but not react until Friday. This is known as “delayed reaction”. Therefore, delayed reactions are not seen in clinic skin tests, which frequently leads to misdiagnosis. For this reason, we recommend doing a blood test, that provides accurate measurement of IgE mold antibodies.

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Type of Molds

·  Composting Molds – are indoor molds that thrive in damp, dark and warm areas commonly found in kitchens, bathrooms, and basements. They are known to cause eye itching, sneezing, and aggravate asthma symptoms

·  Field Molds – are outdoor molds that blow through the air on sunny, windy days. They can cause sinus pressure, aching, and throat drainage

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Treatment

As for treating mold allergies, Sublingual Immunotherapy (SLIT) is a great option, as other forms of  immunotherapy do not treat the delayed reactions. SLIT treats the specific molds at very precise levels that are custom to each patient, providing an added measure of safety.

For more information about treating mold allergies, please call our office at 949-726-0707.