The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States announced that there has been roughly a 50% increase in the prevalence of food allergies among people between the years of 1997 - 2011. A food allergy can be described as a medical condition where being exposed to a…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States announced that there has been roughly a 50% increase in the prevalence of food allergies among people between the years of 1997 - 2011. A food allergy can be described as a medical condition where being exposed to a certain food triggers a harmful immune response in the body, known as an allergic reaction. These reactions can range from mild to fatal, and they are caused mainly by the top 8 major food allergens: dairy, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, wheat, soy, fish, and shellfish. Food allergies mainly plague children under the age of 3, as some of them will grow out of their allergy sensitivity over time, and most people develop their allergies at a young age, and not when they are older. The rise in prevalence is becoming a frightening problem around the world, and there are emerging theories that are attempting to ascribe a cause. There are three well-known hypotheses that will be discussed: the Hygiene Hypothesis, the Dual-Allergen Exposure Hypothesis, and the Vitamin-D Deficiency Hypothesis. Beyond that, this report proposes that a new hypothesis be studied, the Food Systems Hypothesis. This hypothesis theorizes that the cause of the rise of food allergies is actually caused by changes in the food itself and particularly the pesticides that are used to cultivate it.
Eosinophil peroxidase (EPX) is a marker of eosinophilic inflammation in allergic diseases. Currently, measuring EPX in nasal swabs as a surrogate for airway eosinophil levels is completed using a gold standard enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) lab test. The purpose of this project was to develop and validate a novel lateral…
Eosinophil peroxidase (EPX) is a marker of eosinophilic inflammation in allergic diseases. Currently, measuring EPX in nasal swabs as a surrogate for airway eosinophil levels is completed using a gold standard enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) lab test. The purpose of this project was to develop and validate a novel lateral flow assay (LFA) that measures EPX with the same sensitivity and range of detection as the gold standard EPX ELISA, but that can be efficiently used in clinical settings. The results of this project show that the EPX LFA is a promising method for measuring EPX in nasal swab samples. While future studies are needed for further validation, the EPX LFA could provide rapid point-of-care EPX measurements for clinicians and patients suffering with eosinophil-associated diseases.
