The research, published today in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and led by King's and Imperial College London, shows for the first time that measuring airborne allergen levels will help people with hay fever better control their symptoms.
1 in 4 adults in the UK suffer from hay fever from late-March to September. Symptoms include a runny or blocked nose, sneezing and coughing and itchy, red or watery eyes. Hay fever can make lung conditions such as asthma worse, causing wheezing and breathing difficulties which can lead to hospitalisation.
Many people with hay fever monitor peak pollen times to manage their symptoms. In the UK, pollen grains are manually measured to find the daily pollen count. But authors of this study say measuring allergen levels instead will be more accurate as each pollen grain can release a different amount of allergen each day, and it is the allergens in the air that are primarily responsible for causing hay fever symptoms. Currently, there is no regular monitoring of allergen levels in the UK or elsewhere.
Authors collected daily symptom and medication scores from adult participants in an allergy clinical trial as well as daily counts of asthma hospital admissions in London. They measured grass pollen counts and but also sampled air for the grass pollen Phl p 5 grass allergen protein in the same location at King's College London over the same time period.
First author Dr. Elaine Fuertes, from Imperial College London, says: "Grass pollen is the most common hay fever trigger. In this study, we measured grass allergen (Phl p 5) levels and found this was more consistently associated with allergic respiratory symptoms than grass pollen counts."
Research is ongoing to see whether regular measurement of allergen levels can become the standard in the UK, and whether there are other environmental factors, such as meteorological factors including temperature, wind, humidity, and air pollutants, that influence how much allergen each pollen grain releases.
Read the paper Phl p 5 levels more strongly associated than grass pollen counts with allergic respiratory health in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology by authors from King's College London, Imperial College London, Technische Universität München and Helmholtz Center Munich, Germany, University of Florence, and USL Toscana Centro, Italy.
