UPDATED: an Allergist has answered your questions

[DrAdamFox1]

My name is Dr Adam Fox,

I am a paediatric allergist and I will be coming to Mumsnet on May 23rd to try and answer all your allergy-related questions. The MNHQ video team will record my answers, which will be posted back into this thread.

I have worked in this field for over 15 years and was one of the founders of the children's allergy service at Guy's & St Thomas' Hospitals. I am a trustee of Allergy UK and currently President of the British Society for Allergy & Clinical Immunology. I see thousands of children's with allergies every year so will do my best to answer pretty much anything allergy related!

Hi! Polymorphic light eruption (sun allergy) any advice for dealing with it? Thank you

Hello, thank you for answering our questions! I was wondering what the current advice is for children who have a sibling or parent with a severe allergy (specifically anaphylaxis to peanuts). Should they be referred to a specialist clinic for testing? Or should they have nuts introduced from six months like other babies?

Dr Fox, are you still there? Just seen this & really hope to catch you. My eldest son (age 12) has a nut allergy, we have Epi-pens. He also gets quite a lot of skin reactions in summer due to heat, pollen and bites, sometime quite dramatically, for which takes anti-histamine daily. For most of his life he has had digestive issues, from age 6+ it has been lots of posseting, intense cramps (to the point he can't stand) and very smelly poo. Diagnosis IBS & treatment Mbeverine (helps), Omeprazole (not v helpful) and pain management from Clinical Psych (somewhat useful). GP beginning the think this allergy based but food diaries inconclusive, milk elimination made no difference and reduced gluten v helpful. We at a total dead end with hospital, 'manage symptoms'. He is in pain every day, attendance at school worryingly low, social life at mercy of symptoms. No allergy testing for anything other than nuts & pollen. Where do we go from here?

Sorry, one more. His brother, now 6, starting with same. Has asthma & eczema. Dreadful reflux, nights spent trying to vomit. Both dreadful nausea. Thank you in advance for reading.

hi, hope you can help my 1 year old daughter has Eczema on her face not sure what is causing it , could it be food related? Have cut out milk and wheat. Had been to the docs for some hydrocortisone oitement had cleared up but had come back really bad again , don't know what to do she scratches it it's starting to weep and really raw, don't want to rely on the hydrocortisone a it thins the layer of skin please help thanks in advance.

MNHQ When can we expect the video with responses??

I was wondering that too. Did he answer any questions?

Any update please MNHQ

@FrancescaMumsnet Any update on this? It would be great to know if Dr Fox was able to answer our questions, even if the video isn't ready yet.

Hello everyone!

Apologies, Dr Fox was unable to make it last week to film due to an illness.

He will be coming in today to film and will do his best to answer as many of your questions as possible.

Thanks for the update

Hi Everyone!

Thank you so much for your questions. We received so many great ones. Sorry if we didn't get to yours, but I don't think anyone would have wanted a half an hour video!

You should find this thread has been updated with a video embedded into it where Dr Adam Fox answers your questions.

For app users, you can see the video here.

The videos are presented by Dr Adam Fox and Emma Amoscato, author of "Living With Allergies."

Its great that you were able to get Dr Fox to give up his time for this as I imagine he is very busy. Please thank him for that.

However, I would have been more than happy to have been presented with a half hour video of lots of answers as it feels like he barely scratched the surface. I think we only got answers to 5 questions - about 10% of the total number submitted.

Looking back through the thread,there were a fair few of us looking for more information on de-sensitisation regimes for example. It would have been good to know if anything other than peanuts/dust/hayfever are being looked into or whether we should just accept our lot with our extremely allergic DC.

Maybe we can hope for a return visit one day?

I agree, although incredibly grateful for Dr Fox's time I don't think much was addressed by him which was disappointing. I think in future Mumsnet it would be worth managing expectations on such an evocative topic.

That was a waste of time.

I think he (intentionally) misunderstood my question about steroids. My son didn’t have circulatory collapse, but was having a severe allergic reaction. Prednisolone dampens the immune response - and that’s why I used it. The GP said that stopped my son going into anaphylaxis.

Dr Fox came across as smug and had a list of questions he was prepared to answer. It wasn’t helpful. Please feed this back.

DearGoodness you took the words out of my mouth.
I felt like the questions that most people asked - about desensitisation therapies etc - not even questions about individual cases, just the treatments in general - weren’t answered at all.
Not remotely helpful.

Mumsnet. If you had or have an allergic child I’m sure you would understand all parents would sit though an hour video if it came up with answers or good news regarding the future research.

I know I would.

It’s VERY Difficult to get help within the NHS and waiting lists are extremely long and although we are grateful for Dr Fox time. the answers were pretty much what I already knew just from doing my own research.

@mintyneb my son is hopefully going to be part of a clinical trial looking at milk immunotherapy treatment. It’s called SOCMA and is based at St Thomas’s hospital in London.

St Mary's hospital Paddington sorry not St Thomas's.

clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02216175

That's interesting emotionalaffair. My DD has to carry an epipen with her all the time so it would be great if at some point in the future there could be something to take the fear away from eating out and about.

I suspect we will need to wait a while before putting her forwards for any trial though, her reactions can be a bit severe!

@mintyneb, they said that they won't take kids on the trial if they have had an anaphylactic reaction that meant they were admitted to intensive care.

DS is ana to milk and has had to use his epipens a couple of times and they were happy to take him forward for it.

Hi all,

Thanks for your thoughts! In terms of the length of video, our analytics tell us these AMA videos are usually watched on average for around 3 minutes. So at over 6 minutes we thought this video would be about right. But if the feeling is you'd prefer longer for expert AMA videos, we can look at pushing the length up in future.

The video AMA format is still something we're experimenting with. It's good to know what is and isn't working, so thanks for the feedback.

I think being able to read written answers is more useful and accessible than an video. Quite a lot of us are reading MN in places we can't easily watch a video, and it allows you to more quickly look through questions to find those relevant to you.

I usually prefer written answers too but I quite liked this video. I watched it with the sound off, reading the subtitles, which were good. I was disappointed my question wasn't answered but did find the rest interesting. Would have happily watched a longer video though - for those of us managing allergies it's all very relevant.

Thank you so much, very useful and informative.