Dr. Prasad Muley

Allergen immunotherapy is safe for children and has a well-established safety record spanning decades of clinical use. When given under medical supervision with appropriate patient selection, the risk of serious reactions is very low. The treatment works by gradually re-educating the immune system to tolerate the specific allergen rather than reacting to it  -  and this process takes time. Most patients notice meaningful improvement in symptoms within the first 6 to 12 months of the maintenance phase, with the full benefit becoming apparent over the course of the 3 to 5 year treatment period. Importantly, the benefits of immunotherapy persist for several years after the treatment course is completed, making it the only allergy treatment with genuine long-term disease modification rather than symptom suppression while treatment continues.

Allergy testing can be performed from infancy, and there is no minimum age below which it is not worth doing if the clinical question is clear. Skin prick testing  -  where small amounts of standardised allergen extracts are placed on the forearm skin with a lancet  -  is quick, well-tolerated in children of all ages, and provides results within 15 to 20 minutes. It identifies which specific allergens the child's immune system has produced IgE antibodies against. For very young infants or children who cannot cooperate with skin testing, specific IgE blood tests provide equivalent information. The results of allergy testing do not diagnose allergy on their own  -  they are always interpreted alongside the child's clinical history of reactions to determine which sensitisations are clinically relevant.

Not every child who falls sick frequently has an immune problem  -  children in daycare and school settings normally have 6 to 8 respiratory infections per year as their immune system encounters new viruses. The pattern that warrants immune evaluation is different: more than 8 significant infections per year, two or more episodes of pneumonia in a single year, infections that are unusually severe, prolonged, or require intravenous antibiotics to clear, infections with organisms that normally only cause serious disease in immunocompromised individuals, or a family history of primary immunodeficiency. If your child's pattern of illness fits any of these descriptions, a consultation with a paediatric allergy and immunology specialist for structured immune evaluation is the appropriate next step.

FAAAI stands for Fellow of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the foremost professional body for allergy and clinical immunology in the United States. Holding FAAAI status represents training and peer recognition at an internationally benchmarked level, and very few paediatricians practising in India hold this fellowship. For families, it means that the evaluation and management of their child's allergy, asthma, or immune condition is informed by the same standards used in the world's leading allergy and immunology centres. In practical terms, FAAAI training covers the full clinical scope of allergy from food allergy and anaphylaxis through to primary immunodeficiency evaluation  -  and brings that depth of expertise to paediatric care in Gujarat.