Cmpa and suspected egg protein allergy

[Mnoh]

Hello! My 21 week old was diagnosed with CMPA and recently we suspected egg protein allergy too. I am exclusively pumping as prescription formula did not agree with her gut (Aptamil pepti 1 gave her constipation and nutrimegen kept giving terrible reflux).
Over the weekend I had quite a bit of egg and the symptoms started around a day after.

Does anyone else have experience with egg protein allergy and what the symptoms were ? I wish I could give her the formula to avoid all this but nothing is working. I’m also not sure if there is anything else she’s allergic too.
Also does anyone know if there is anyway to test for these allergies?
Any advice would be appreciated! Thank you

When my son was little, there was a blood test that showed what he was allergic to and yes, eggs was one of those things. However, it was twenty years ago, in Denmark, the doctor has retired and they have only just recently restarted the courses teaching doctors about allergies after not having those courses for twenty or so years.

Linseed is best as egg surrogate when making meat loaf or cake. Aqua faba is better for meat balls.

Sometimes when it says "lecithin" on food packaging they mean egg. Search for soya lecithin or go to the aisle with "free for..." products.

Ironically, lecithin pills made with sunflower 🌻 oil has really helped both my husband and my son. My husband has switched over to lecithin powder and puts a spoonful on his yoghurt every morning.

We put a spoonful of primrose oil in our son's yoghurt every morning for years. Then he got better when he became a teenager and I guess we kind of forgot about it but my husband prefers the taste of the lecithin powder. It is less noticeable.

Thank you for your response !! Didn’t know about lecithin!

There are blood tests, but the easiest thing for serious allergies is something called skin prick testing. This is done at a GP or the hospital, they will put a little of the suspected allergen on the baby's skin (usually their back if they are this small but it can be the arm in older children). Then for comparison a drop of water and a drop of pure histamine, and they poke a teeny needle into each of them to prick the skin. After about ten minutes the skin under the histamine drop will have swollen a bit like a bug bite, the one under the water will not have reacted and the size of the bump for the allergen by comparison will tell you how serious/likely an allergy is to that thing.

It's trickier when dealing with non-IGE (not immediate) allergies that cause delayed symptoms a day or so later. The doctor will ask you to keep a food diary tracking exactly what is eaten when and any symptoms (loose stool, eczema worsening, stomach pain, etc) so you can begin to work out what is the cause without cutting out other foods unnecessarily. Usually there will be several follow up appointments with a dietician to help get to the bottom of it and also help with advice on the right vitamins and getting enough calcium into the child's diet.

There are a lot of bogus tests out there for allergies, done by non doctors - waving crystals around, 'testing' hair etc - but the skin prick and food diary stuff is reliable and professional. It's done on NHS so ask your GP about it, they can refer you to a children's allergy doctor who will be able to explain and help.

Yes my daughter reacted to dairy and eggs. The most common allergies in babies are dairy, soya and egg although you can be allergic to anything. My daughter has 20 allergies which she reacted to through my breastmilk. She's 5.5 and only just starting to outgrow them.

You can only test for immediate allergies and not delayed allergies and even those are unreliable in young babies. We only identified my daughters allergies through very careful food diaries to spot the patterns. We then removed and reintroduced the suspected item to see if symptoms went away and then came back.

Both of those formulas are dairy containing and this might be why you were still getting symptoms. If you wanted to give formula another go you would want to push for an amino acid formula such as neocate or alfamino as these are completely dairy free. You most probably want to add a thickener such as gaviscon or carobel as they can trigger reflux as they are thinner than regular formula.