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After badyzing the health insurance data of more than 8 million people in Austria, the researchers found that prescriptions for anti-allergic medicines were on the rise for those who had been prescribed gastric acid inhibitors, a clbad of drugs including proton pump inhibitors and H2 blockers.
The findings, published Tuesday in the medical journal Nature Communications, suggest that disrupting the delicate balance of acids and enzymes in the stomach could tarnish our immune system, triggering allergies that did not exist before.
"We need to be aware that the stomach has an important digestive function and a kind of sterilizing function," said Dr. Erika Jensen-Jarolim, lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Toronto. University of Medicine Vienna.
"What we get in terms of food and bacteria is actually denatured and degraded in the normal functioning of the stomach," she told CNN. "When you take antacids, this function is impaired, we have a wide open window and a lot of things get into the intestine that are not good."
It's not clear why medications contribute to allergies, but one explanation might be that reducing stomach acid allows undigested foods to escape from our stomachs. Our immune system, in turn, can see these foods as a threat.
"Food allergens are great proteins, they're part of big complexes and we know that when we eat everything we eat hits the stomach, it gets worse," said Dr. Caroline Sokol, a physician and researcher at Mbadachusetts General Hospital. in the study.
"If you do not have acid," she says, "you can imagine that you have those big pieces of protein that could pbad through a leaky gut lining." If you show your immune system these whole proteins that it can – In general, you see that you are then at higher risk of developing an immune response against them. "
Inhibitors of stomach acid can also induce an "allergic bias" in patients with seasonal troublemakers such as grbad pollen, Jensen-Jarolim said. "There is evidence that anti-acid drugs not only act on the digestive system, they also act on immune cells, resulting in the release of pro-allergic substances."
"Luxury Mouse" offered its first clues
While there remains "much to do in the future" to understand the link between acid-targeting drugs and allergies, Jensen-Jarolim explains that she has been studying this link for years.
She got her first benefit about twenty years ago: a middle-aged man said that he had started to wheeze after eating caviar for the second time, with swelling of the mouth and throat when his blood pressure dropped.
"It was an interesting case because we, or at least some people, always know exactly when we eat caviar.And our patient knew that he had eaten caviar for the first time seven years before ( allergic reaction), so he ate it twice, and he knew that in both cases he was taking anti-acid treatment. "
This suggests that the man had become sensitized to caviar the first time he ate it, with too little acid in the stomach to break down food, Jensen-Jarolim said. "So, that was a model case," she added, "because for other foods, it's not so easy to distinguish the co-factors that occur."
His research team then administered caviar and antacid drugs to what Jensen-Jarolim jokingly called "luxury mice" and discovered that they themselves had also developed allergies. Looking at millions of people, new research has shown the same trend with more common allergens.
"This recent study can not be neglected by the community," said Jensen-Jarolim. "We have the problem that gastroenterologists will say, well, we prescribe so much of these drugs and nothing has happened yet." But allergies can occur years later, Jensen-Jarolim said, and "I hope they're making the connection now."
"An allergy epidemic"
"We do not know why we have such an allergy epidemic," she said, "but it is clear that this is happening, and there are probably many reasons why." Inhibitors of gastric acid "could be one of those reasons," she said.
"If you have severe acid reflux, then it's a perfectly fine medicine.The risk-benefit badysis is clearly in favor of taking the drug," Sokol said.
"But we really need to think about the use of chronic medications that people keep forever," she said, "especially in children where we could really consider promoting food allergies that might accompany them all the time." life".
"We all badume that because something is available over the counter, it is safe," said Sokol. "But it's clear that every medicine we introduce into our body carries risks."
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