Healthy Living and Fitness

Illness Care: Allergies and Causes

Causes

Heredity: Children with one allergic parent have a 30 to 50 percent chance of developing allergies, although they may get a different type of allergy than their parents. Their chances of developing allergies rise as high as 60 to 80 percent if both parents have them. However, children from the same family may not get the same allergies. Studies show that only 25 to 50 percent of identical twins share the same type of allergy. In many cases, one twin will have allergies and the other won't. This means environment is an important factor, too.

Environment: While your genes make you more vulnerable to an allergy, it's your environment that starts the process. Specifically, it's being in a place where you are exposed to high levels of a particular allergen - especially early in life. Infants and young children exposed to a lot of pollen, for example, are more likely to get hay fever than those less exposed even when heredity is taken into account. So if you have allergies and one of your children is exposed to dust mites during infancy, chances are he'll be more likely to develop dust mite allergies than another child of yours who wasn't around mites - or an exposed child of someone not allergic. It's always a combination of both factors that paves the way for allergies to develop.

 

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