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Derzeit
gibt es noch keinen einzelnen Labortest, mit dessen Hilfe
sich eine Lebensmittel-Allergie zuverlässig beweisen läßt.
Evaluating the clinical relevance of food sensitivity tests:
a single subject experiment.
Herman PM, Drost LM
Altern Med Rev. 2004 Jun; 9 2: 198-207
A number of tests are available to identify food sensitivities.
This article presents an analysis of the diagnostic value
of nine different food sensitivity tests run concurrently
on a healthy 33-year-old female with a previous diagnosis
of environmental allergies. This case study evaluated conventional
allergy tests (skin prick and serum IgE), tests of other immune-mediated
reactions (serum IgG and salivary IgA), and tests that claim
to measure the energetic reaction of the whole person to particular
foods (kinesiology, Vega, and Carroll testing).
The results
of an elimination/challenge test were used as indicators of
true food reactions in order to calculate the sensitivity,
specificity, and positive predictive value (PPV) of each test.
In a separate evaluation, the variability of results across
the four tests measuring IgG was determined.
Results
show several tests (one of the two serum tests of IgG alone,
both serum tests of IgE and IgG, skin prick testing, and Carroll
testing) may have very high (100 percent) specificity and
PPV when test results are compared to the results of an elimination/challenge
test. Sensitivity, however, is low across tests (50-60 percent),
likely because different tests measure different mechanisms
of food reactions and because food sensitivities can be the
result of a number of different mechanisms.
Very little consistency was found among the results of the
four tests measuring IgG - 79-83 percent disagreement.
This study
shows a number of tests may be useful in identifying foods
to which a patient is reactive; however, no one test is likely
to identify all reactive foods.
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