Matti Hannuksela
DOI: 10.2340/00015555928790

Skin testing to find food allergy in atopic dermatitis is recommcnded from the age of 4 months up the early adulthood. Scratch, scratch-chamber, prick and intra­cutancous tests may be used. In order to obtain optimal benefit from skin testing, both commercial extracts and fresh foodstuffs must be used. Extracts of protein-rich foods. such as fish, egg and nuts, work very well in skin tests, but fruits and vegetablas lose their allergenicity easily in the extraction process and that is why they are tested in raw state. The younger the patient the better the correlation bctween the skin test results and the challenge tests. The nature of the allergen also has a great influence on the clinical relevancy of the skin tests. Extracts of various cereals correlate for example in almost every case with skin reactivity alone and not with symptoms from ingested cereals.