Allergist Pooja Patel, MD: So when we talk about common allergy triggers, there’s two ways to think about it – inside allergens and outside allergens.
For outside allergens, pollen is the most common outside allergen trigger. Most commonly we’re thinking about tree pollen, grass pollen, ragweed pollen and weed pollen. Trees and grasses usually pollinate in the spring and summer season, and the fall season, we have our ragweed and weeds outside.
The way to avoid them is to make sure your bedroom windows are closed during the peak pollen season and to correlate your symptoms with the peak pollen season. Meaning, if you have high tree pollen count and you’re having symptoms, then it is more valuable to do some of these avoidance things.
Another thing you can do with outside allergens is, if you’re going to be spending your whole day outside, you come back inside, you take your shoes off, you change your clothes. Essentially what you don’t want happening is this bringing these outside allergens inside and making it an indoor allergen. So you can take a shower, clean your hair, including you know you’re changing your clothes and all of that as well so that you’re not breathing all of that stuff back in.
For indoor allergens, we think about dustmites and pets being common allergens. The way to do avoidance of that is to make sure you are getting dustmite covers for your bedding, your pillows. You’re washing all of that once a week in hot water. If you have old upholstered furniture you want to think about cleaning that as well or changing it or replacing it frequently to make sure you’re not breathing all of this in, because that’s where the dust mites are harboring or growing.
For pets, try to make your bedroom a pet-free zone. Again, you’re focusing on the bedroom because you’re spending 8 to 9 hours of your day in one spot. You want to try to breathe in as pure of an air as possible or make it as much as hypoallergenic as possible.
One thing I always tell patients there’s no 100% way to completely avoid these allergens. The best you can do is to minimize exposure, and these are a couple of things you could do to minimize exposure.
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Resource Type: Video | Allergy, Hay Fever, Seasonal Allergies
