Dr. Zachary Rubin

You could have a combination of those symptoms that I just mentioned or the dreaded anaphylactic shock where blood pressure drops, you feel faint, you turn pale and potentially blue.

And some people report the sense of impending doom, like they feel like they're going to die.

Luckily, it's rare, but it happens from time to time.

And knock on wood, I have yet to see a child in my practice experience that level of shock.

It's something that usually is more common in adults.

And it has to do with the physiology of how the body works when you're a young child versus as an adult changes.

So this risk of shock is usually much higher in adults.

Yeah, so most of these allergic diseases, it's a combination of genetics and environmental factors.

So if you have a parent with asthma, as an example, their child is significantly at higher risk of developing asthma, which that's an airway disease that's chronic, usually diagnosed in children, but can happen in adults.

And it's often triggered by a lot of these things we've talked about earlier in terms of pollen, mold, different environmental triggers or pollutants, irritants, exercise.

All those things can be triggering to an extent.

Eczema is a significant risk factor for developing asthma.

So that's one example.

The exposures make a difference.

Air pollution, as an example, is a significant risk factor for developing asthma.

or if you are in housing that's very old and has a lot of dust and mold, those early exposures can be problematic.

And what's interesting is recently we've had studies seeing strong associations between somebody who has a gas or wood burning stove

in the house and developing asthma because when you are burning that in your home you are releasing a lot of volatile organic compounds like nitrogen dioxide which can really cause inflammation in your lungs and you don't necessarily smell it but it causes that so if you don't if you don't have an electric stove and you're using gas you got to make sure you put on um the the fan

on your stove, as well as opening up windows whenever you're cooking to reduce the amount of exposure that you have to those irritating substances.

Right.