A small twinge of hope re: Ben's peanut allergy

A recent discussion on a food allergy forum encouraged me to do a bit more digging into the reliability of skin prick testing (SPT) and radioallergosorbent (blood) testing (RAST).

Here's a bit of what I found...

Extensive screening against broad panels of specific allergens that are not linked with symptoms should not be performed, as many of the positive results will be false positives, reflecting the common entity labelled "asymptomatic hypersensitivity". For example, screening an atopic patient for peanut allergy when there is no history of peanut reactions may produce a false positive result. It is inappropriate to recommend allergen avoidance on the basis of SPT or CAP testing alone, as most positive results in patients without an appropriate clinical history are false positive results. (Click for link to source.)

This first snippet is particularly relevant because Ben has *never* had a peanut induced rxn. It had me thinking because I ate peanut granola bars (remember my sweet n' salty addiction?) when he was a wee babe, was careless with a wrapper, and he ended up handling it. I had also kissed his cheeks and never saw a rxn. It could be dumb luck that he's never reacted, or maybe he's not contact sensitive, OR with a whole lotta luck, it'll turn out he's not really allergic.

The reliability of a positive SPT is only about 50% in general; however in cases of anaphylaxis it can confirm the diagnosis. A negative SPT is about 95% predictive but may be a false negative in the very young. This is the situation when the RAST test can be utilized. (Click for link to source.)

A RAST test is a blood test looking for the presence of allergen specific antibodies. It's generally less reliable because it produces more false positives than SPT, *but* a negative is a negative and a positive, in conjunction with a positive SPT, can serve to confirm an allergy, so it's a useful tool for sure.

Anyway, I'm planning to push for a RAST test whether or not the allergist performs an SPT test.

I know it probably sounds like a bunch of gobbledegook, but I'm hopeful. I'm doing my best to not get my hopes up too much though, because logically it really is a small possibility that the positive peanut test result was incorrect since the other positives from that round of testing (egg and milk) were correct.

I'm not one to pray, but that's all I've got right now. How wonderful would it be for my sweet boy to not have a life threatening food allergy hanging over him for the rest of his life.