Suresh Raja, MD, Otolaryngologist and Sinus Surgeon at Aspire Allergy & Sinus talks about a new treatment for allergies.
So, you have COVID and then you also have seasonal allergies, so how could people tell the difference between them – between the two?
RAJA: Environmental allergies, typically you would have itchy, runny eyes, itchy, runny nose, sneezing attacks, facial pressure, but what you wouldn’t have is a fever, muscle aches and pains. Although with environmental allergies you could have problems with your taste and smell, if you have an overwhelming loss of taste and smell suddenly, that’s certainly a COVID trigger. Also, you can certainly have shortness of breath with allergies, but if you don’t have a history of that kind of thing and you have a sudden shortness of breath and difficulty breathing, that could also be a COVID trigger.
So, could someone have seasonal allergies and COVID at the same time?
RAJA: I suppose you could. It would be more like a flu-like symptoms, but again fever, aches, pains, shortness of breath. Also, even GI symptoms is not something we normally see with environmental allergies. Now with COVID, any time anyone hears a cough or sneeze, everybody’s just on alert.
So, with people that have seasonal allergies, especially in the springtime, what can they do to, you know, kind of ease that suffering so they’re not always constantly coughing, sneezing, itchy nose all the time?
RAJA: There’s always over the counter medications that you can take, like antihistamines and topical nasal steroid sprays. We do see a lot of children coming in to get allergy tested so that they can provide that information to the school, so people don’t think that the children have COVID. If they’re going to get tested, they can come up with a personalized plan to treat them as well.
You mentioned some over the counter, can you go into detail a little bit about the different type of treatments?
RAJA: I usually call it the pills, spray, and wash. So, you can take an allergy pill before you go to bed like, you know, Zyrtec or Claritin and when you wake up in the morning, you can do a topical steroid spray like a Flonase or Nasacort. If you could wash your nose, because your nose is a filter, with some saltwater, perhaps in the shower, that’s the pill, spray and wash that we usually recommend for short term. It’s not something you want to do for years and years and years, and that’s what we want to try to avoid.
So, what exactly is a peak time for these seasonal allergies?
RAJA: It’s generally when the seasons change or when it goes from windy to not windy or goes from wet to dry or dry to wet is generally the time. Also, if there’s a period of time where you’re indoors more, then you would be more subject to indoor allergens, which a lot of people are more indoors now because of COVID. That would be more dust and mold and perhaps domesticated animals if you had that in your home.
Wouldn’t that be all year long? Or is it certain months of the year?
RAJA: Certain states are known to have allergies all year long, but typically you can have a ragweed season in Texas, they could have red cedar season. So, it can vary from region to region. If you’re very allergic and you have indoor allergens, that could certainly be all year long.
Would somebody having allergies, especially severe allergies, be put at a greater risk for contracting COVID or suffering more severe symptoms of COVID?
RAJA: It’s all about inflammation. If you’re allergic, your immune system is giving a hyper-immune response, a very reactive response. So, if your immune system is already activated and if you were to contract covid, your symptoms could be more severe. In fact, there have been some reports of that nature for allergic patients receiving the vaccine that’s recently been released as well. In general, it’s all about inflammation. So, the more inflamed you are, the more likely you would be to have more serious effects if you were to contract the COVID-19 virus.
Are there things that people with severe allergies can do if they want to get this vaccine?
RAJA: It’s always a good idea to get your allergies treated if you have severe allergies. We actually have a very simple program called the exact immunoplasty program where, with just three very easy, in-office treatments, you can eliminate your allergies without having to go to the doctor every week. We find it very effective and we’re the only practice in the country, as far as I know, that does that. You can also do allergy drops, but I would say the main thing is that, if you know you’re really allergic, you wouldn’t necessarily rush off to get the vaccine that particular day. So, for instance, if we have patients coming in for allergy shots and they’re having a terrible allergy flare, we may not give them the shot that day, OK? So, it would be kind of that thing or if they’re coming in to get allergy tests and they’re having a terrible asthma attack, that wouldn’t be a good time to test them. So, it’s more like that.
You said it was three treatments and then the allergies are cured, basically? Is that the case that they don’t have those allergies ever and they don’t have to worry about it?
RAJA: So, we have about an 89% success rate after three in-office treatments. The thing is, people have to understand, if they have severe allergies, it can be a multi-year thing to really eliminate their allergies. People don’t really want to come to the doctor every week or every two weeks or every three weeks and we find it to be very effective, even for people who have asthma, actually. So, yes, it would be definitely something, if, as long as you stay in the region where we treated you because, like we mentioned before, allergies is very regional, it is a full treatment course, yes.
Are there any follow-ups to those treatments?
RAJA: So, we do three treatments over a 60-day period and we follow up with them with questionnaires and then we have them come in about three months later and see how they’re doing. If it looks like they’re not doing as well as we would like, we can always retest them if we desensitize to them or even give them a booster shot. So, we have the solutions to handle anything that they can bring to us.
Is the procedure for any type of allergy that a person has or is it customized to that particular allergy or is it a blanket for all type of allergies that they might have?
RAJA: All the treatments we do at Aspire Allergy and Sinus are precise and personalized for the patient based on the testing that they receive here. But in other parts of the world, like Europe, for instance, they might just do grass. Here we are very, very specific, personalized and precise. Yeah.
What is the name of the procedure again?
RAJA: It’s called the exact immunoplasty expedited allergy control treatment.
How would someone get more information about this particular procedure?
RAJA: You can just go to aspireallergy.com. We are a nationwide company. The best thing to do is just to come in and get tested. We can come up with a personalized plan, whether it’s drops where you don’t even have to come to the office, shipped right to your door. Or whether it’s just three simple and office treatments. You’ve just got to come in and get tested.
The drops work the same way as the three?
RAJA: The drops are every day, they’re daily. You download an app to remind you and you put two drops underneath your tongue in the morning and you put one drop underneath your tongue at night. It takes about eight or nine months to sort of kick in for you to notice a difference, and it usually is a multi-year treatment. So, it works, it’s highly effective, it’s great for kids, but there’s a little bit more time frame involved. If people were hesitant putting in a lot of time and energy and effort, the exact immunoplasty is three in-office treatments and you’re done.
When the patient comes into the office for those three treatments, what exactly happens?
RAJA: When they arrive, we basically get access to their upper thigh and we have a specialized formulation that comes from our compounding pharmacy that includes three, four or five of the things that they’re most allergic to. Under ultrasound guidance, we find a lymph node in the upper thigh, and it’s really less than blood draw types of procedure it is. It’s pretty noninvasive, takes really less than a minute. We find the lymph node and we inject what you’re allergic to directly into your lymph node to allow your immune system to be reprogrammed and build up blocking antibodies to everything that you have an amped up immune response to.
From the start to beginning of the procedure, it takes only a minute each time?
RAJA: The actual procedure itself overall probably takes about five minutes and the technical part of it takes about a minute, then we see them in four-week intervals for a total of eight weeks, and usually that’s it.
For the three separate treatments, how far between are they?
RAJA: Four weeks apart for each one.
Is there anything in regards to either the seasonal allergies or for these procedures that you want people to know?
RAJA: One thing I would say is people take a lot of over-the-counter medications and they take it for many years, and if you ask them, they may not even know whether it works or not, they just do it. These types of treatments are not really meant to be that way, that’s not the way the FDA approved those medications. They get used to it and actually, you can end up having things like drugged driving, it can affect learning abilities in children, and even long-term antihistamine use has been connected with risk factors for dementia. So, you may think you’re doing yourself a favor, it’s a big expense, it’s not the way it’s meant to be, and nowadays it’s not, ‘Oh, I can’t make it to my doctor’s office for an allergy shot.’ We have options for you that you can do at home or just come in three times.
Any side effects to either the drops or the treatment?
RAJA: There’s always a chance of what we call an anaphylactic reaction. So, you would always want to go to a practice that is well-versed in all elements of allergy care. We know how to ameliorate that, and sometimes we may treat patients, pre-treat patients with steroids before their procedure. Of course, patients have the ability to have an EpiPen and we fully train them. So, we really don’t have those issues and when we do, they’re well controlled and extremely rare.
Is it covered by insurance?
RAJA: These treatments are not, the testing is, but the allergy drops are quite affordable. They’re 40 to $60 a month, and the exact immunoplasty, which as I mentioned, is five years of allergy drops, is $2,500. We offer payment plans and for as much as people put in, what they get out of it has been really quite life-changing for many, many patients and very convenient. So, we do believe we offer a very good value.
The drops over a five-year span could cost $2,500?
RAJA: It probably would cost more. When you were to do the math, and would you do it for five years? Maybe you would do it for a couple of years. You know, it really depends. People start feeling better, they maybe slack off and the exact immunoplasty, you are desensitized. So, if we retest you to what we put in you, you’re no longer allergic to it, which is similar to what the allergy drops do as well but when you’re taking it through the GI system, it takes a while for the immune system to build up. When you take weekly injections, it takes a while as well, but when you are mainlining the treatment directly into your immune system by putting it into a lymph node, things happen a lot quicker, and we’ve proved that with the research that we’ve done prior to offering this to the general public.
For the injection into the lymph node for those three procedures, the total cost is?
RAJA: Total cost is $2,500 for the treatment. The testing is covered by insurance and even for those patients that are self-pay, it’s very reasonable considering how much people suffer and how much they think about treating their allergies and really how much they might even spend on a yearly basis for all the medication and lost workdays and, you know, just being miserable.
Anything else that you think people should know?
RAJA: Well, I just think that, you know, most diseases come from chronic inflammation. What we find is if people are very inflamed, they might have more than just environmental allergies, they might have food allergies, they might have chemical sensitivities, they might have even autoimmune diseases, which is a ramped-up inflammation. So, I would say that, you know, the best thing to do is to try to be as least inflamed as you can by avoiding triggers.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News.
END OF INTERVIEW
This information is intended for additional research purposes only. It is not to be used as a prescription or advice from Ivanhoe Broadcast News, Inc. or any medical professional interviewed. Ivanhoe Broadcast News, Inc. assumes no responsibility for the depth or accuracy of physician statements. Procedures or medicines apply to different people and medical factors; always consult your physician on medical matters.
If you would like more information, please contact:
GOLDYN DAUPIN
GOLDYN.DAUPIN@ASPIREALLERGY.COM
(512) 628-5985
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