AboutKathleen MacNaughton Expertise As a registered nurse and health educator, as well as a person living with nasal allergies, eczema, allergic asthma, and eye allergies, I can answer questions related to allergy symptoms, triggers, diagnosis, and treatment.
Experience I have lived with severe nasal, eye, and skin allergies all of my life. I also have allergic asthma. In addition, I have been an RN for more than 30 years and have spent the last 10 years as a consumer health educator, both offline and online, specializing in the areas of allergies and asthma.
Publications About.com (asthma), HealthCentral.com (asthma and allergy networks), RhinocortAqua.com, EverydayKidz.com
Education/Credentials Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing from Syracuse University.
This is something I’ve been wondering about for a long time and I’d greatly appreciate it if you could satisfy my curiosity. Is it possible to have two (or more) different allergic reactions at the same time? For example, say a person experienced anaphylaxis when eating peanuts, and got hives when eating strawberries. If this person were to eat a strawberry and then a peanut, would he or she get hives as well as anaphylaxis? Or would one reaction take precedence over the other? If the peanuts and the strawberries caused about the same reaction, would someone have a doubly worse reaction after coming into contact with two allergens instead of one? And would this hold true even if one allergen was food related and one was pollen or something else? How many different allergens could the body fight off at once? Sorry, I know those were rather a lot of questions. I do hope you can settle this matter for me; it’s been driving me nuts. Thank you for your time!
Answer Hi Stephanie,
I'm a bit leery of answering this question, as I'm wondering why you want to know. You're not planning to expose yourself to as many of your known triggers at once as you can, are you?
Allergic reactions, whether the relatively mild kind that you can get from being outside during pollen season to the anaphylactic level ones you can get from eating peanuts, are very unpredictable. Your reaction could change from exposure to exposure. But often, allergic reactions to food get progressively worse over time, as your sensitivity becomes more and more acute.
Anaphylaxis is always a potential risk for anyone who has allergies or asthma of any type and with sensitivities to any trigger. It's always possible.
And as far as I know, subjecting yourself to several triggers at once is bound to increase the severity of your symptoms. Each trigger can bind to different types of immune cells in your body, so it's very unlikely that one allergy would "cancel" another one out.
My advice? Avoid all of your triggers all of the time. And certainly don't ever knowingly expose yourself to more than one at a time.
And start putting your worrying energies into something more productive. :-)
