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Dust Mite Allergies - Causes, Risks, and Dangers |
 The key to conquering any allergy you have is understanding how that allergy works and what you can expect. Unlike allergies to milk or chlorine, a dust mite allergy involves a living thing. To beat the allergic symptoms caused by dust mites, you have to get rid of the dust mites from your home. But how do dust mites cause allergies in the first place?
Dust mites do best in relatively humid temperatures because they absorb their moisture from the atmosphere rather than needing to drink water like you and I. That is why they can thrive for generations of dust mites in dry environments like carpets and mattresses. Their primary food are dead skin cells, which are abundant in a home setting.
We don’t think about it much but the dust we clean up in our homes is made up of a variety of loose particles of dirt. But much of what makes up the dust in our home are human skin cells that we shed. We are constantly producing these discarded cells into our chairs, our carpets and particularly into our bedding and mattresses. Human dead skin cells provide the food dust mites consume. Those skin cells also hold moisture that help dust mites thrive. So bedding and the carpets and mattresses in bedrooms are a prime breeding ground for dust mites that can go on to produce allergy problems for us.
If that wasn’t disgusting enough, the source of the allergies are not the living dust mites themselves. There is a protein that resides in the dead and decaying bodies of dust mites and in dust mites residue or "feces" that also builds up in the same places where the dust mites live. That dead material is what sets off most allergic reactions that we have come to call a dust mite allergy.
The actual dust mite allergy symptoms are actually the activity of the immune system, which begins to generate antibodies to fight that dust mite debris when it gets inhaled into the body through the nose or mouth. While everybody's immune system correctly fights back against bacteria, toxic material or viruses that can hurt it, an allergy occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks something else as though it was a disease causing cell. In this case, if the immune system tags that dust mite residue as a threat, it becomes hypersensitive to it and you will have an allergic reaction to dust mite residue from then on.
Not everybody develops an allergy to dust mites. There are three factors that make your risk for developing a dust mite allergy more likely. If you have a family history of hypersensitivity to dust mite allergies, that raises your risk level. If an infant or young child is exposed to an unusually high amount of dust mite reside when the immune system is young, that could lead to a life long allergy to dust mites as well.
Childhood, infancy and young adulthood are the age levels where the potential for developing a dust mite allergy are the greatest. That is important information for parents because by keeping a home that is not hospitable to dust mites, you cut down on the odds your children will develop this allergy significantly.
The severity of dust mite allergic attacks varies depending on other factors including the general health of the allergy sufferer. Like any inflammation of the nasal tissue, if the problem does not clear up quickly, that inflammation can develop into a sinus infection that may require medical attention.
Also, patients who already are dealing with the symptoms of asthma could be at a higher risk for symptoms of dust mite allergy that could requite emergency medical care. Be sensitive to this allergy in your family members and take action when those symptoms flare up so you don’t let dust mite allergy symptoms develop into something serious, dangerous or chronic.
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