News & Press

Consultant led Allergy Clinic opens its doors

date: 22 October 2009

A new consultant led allergy clinic has opened at London Bridge Hospital.  The clinic is treating patients with both environmental and food induced allergies and those for whom certain drugs become allergens.

The allergy clinic is led by one of Europe’s most distinguished consultants, Dr Pierre Dugué who trained and practised for many years in Paris and on the Cote D’Azur.

Dr Dugué is also currently a consultant with the renowned Guy’s Hospital allergy unit.

The growing demand for the treatment of allergies has long outstripped the capacity of the very few specialist allergy clinics in the UK.

“Most allergic reactions occur as a result of environmental and individual genetic reasons but our research has shown that we can now effectively treat the vast majority of conditions,” said Dr Dugué.

“While the incidence of asthma has now reached a plateau, there is a steady increase in the incidence of allergic reactions in children but there are also more cases of adults suddenly developing allergies to certain types of food,” he said.  “Desensitisation is an increasing area of our work.  Essentially this is a vaccination with varying concentrations of allergen, once that allergen has been identified,” said Dr Dugué.

“We use either sub-cutaneous immunotherapy by repeated injections or sub lingual immunotherapy with daily drops under the tongue.”

“The second main area of the clinic’s work is a new procedure for the diagnosis and treatment of drug hypersensitivity.  Drug challenge is the ‘gold standard’ of diagnosing drug allergic hypersensitivity when conventional allergy tests are negative or not available,” he said.

Patients undergo this diagnosis as a day procedure and the drug challenge involves a cautious and graded re-introduction of the suspected drug under strict medical control.  This begins with the ingestion of a tiny dose followed by incremental increases of dosage up to the normal therapeutic dose.  The challenge is stopped if an allergic reaction occurs and the patient is immediately treated.  However, because of the low doses administered, any reactions are almost always very mild.

“We have achieved remarkable success in helping patients with the technique of drug desensitisation allowing many of them to resume treatment with drugs they were previously allergic to, such as aspirin, penicillin and vitamin B12.  We have also been able to identify people who have been wrongly suspected of having an allergy to drugs such as penicillin from their childhood,” said Dr Dugué.

For further information about the new Allergy Clinic, please call Lesley-Anne Walker on 020 7234 2939.

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