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A clinical report in the journal Pediatrics warns against overuse of allergy tests. Because positive tests offer only circumstantial evidence that a child has an allergy and false positives are common, unneeded allergy tests can end up doing more harm than good.
The report is designed to give pediatricians more guidance regarding when allergy testing is called for and when it isn’t. The guidelines in the report will be useful for parents as well.
The purpose of an allergy test should be to help confirm a suspected allergy, not to look for an allergy in a person or child that doesn’t show any symptoms of one. Allergy tests are simply one weapon in the arsenal used to find out if a suspected allergy exists. They should never be used as standalone evidence that a child has an allergy. Yet too often, they are.
For example, in children with moderate to severe asthma, an allergy test could be helpful. That’s because asthma is often triggered by an allergy to cockroaches, pets, dust mites, pollen, or other substances. But testing for an allergy to these substances in a child without any symptoms is basically a fishing expedition.
Most allergy tests look for production of specific antibodies after exposure to a substance like peanuts or pollen or dogs. Skin prick tests look for a swelling or weal after scratching a test substance onto the surface of the skin. Blood tests measure the amount of specific antibodies circulating in the blood after an injection of the suspect substance.
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