Food Sensitivity Testing
Testing that your allergist doesn’t test for.
Many people have food sensitivities that can’t be explained by traditional allergy testing. Commonly, these sensitivities are dismissed as not important, but the reality is that they can have a dramatic impact on how you feel, the body’s overall inflammatory state and long-term health.
This generalized inflammation can serve to disrupt the critical balance that the body seeks to constantly maintain and, in turn, impair systems like immune function, digestion and absorption, hormone function, and cardiovascular health.
These sensitivities are mediated by the body’s more primitive immune responses called humoral mediators of immunity – rather than antibodies. Humoral mediators of immunity are non-specific, non-memory reactions as far as we know. However, within individual people, there are common reactions to substances ingested – just like a memory antibody response but without the same physiology.
Our partnership with Oxford Biomedical Technologies, Inc. allows us to test for these non-allergy mediators of inflammation using their proprietary Mediator Release Test (MRT®).
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Courtesy of Oxford Biomedical Technologies
Despite all of the clinical and immunologic complexities associated with food sensitivities, the single common component of all diet-induced inflammatory reactions is proinflammatory and proalgesic mediator release from white cells. It’s the release of cytokines, histamine, leukotrienes, prostaglandins, etc. from neutrophils, monocytes, eosinophils and lymphocytes that lead to all the negative clinical effects a food sensitivity sufferer endures. This is true under all of the numerous immunologic circumstances and clinical circumstances associated with food sensitivities. Because of the vast array of potential mediators and reacting cells, measuring volumetric changes in all circulating white cells after antigen challenge is the most logical, direct, comprehensive and functional measure of food sensitivity reactions. It simply makes the most sense.
Research on MRT® confirms this. Studies with the University of Miami and research presented at major medical conferences show that MRT® is able to distinguish between symptomatic and asymptomatic populations, that MRT® correlates with inflammation and symptoms, that diets based on MRT® show significant symptom reduction, and that MRT® has excellent real-world reproducibility.
Conversely, a large body of research has shown that elevated mechanisms in food sensitivity, such as food-specific IgG or immune complexes, do not reliably correlate with inflammation or symptoms.
Mediator release is the key event that leads to every negative effect your patients suffer. What matters clinically is that mediator release, and thus an inflammatory response has occurred – not that a potential mechanism is elevated.
This is the clinical value of MRT®. MRT® is a functional measurement of diet-induced sensitivity pathways. MRT® simplifies a highly complex reaction and translates that into the most useable clinical information you can get – quantifying the inflammatory response to foods and food-chemicals.
Not only does MRT® give insight into inflammation provoking foods and food-chemicals, but more importantly MRT® identifies your patient’s BEST foods. Simply put, MRT® gives you information you can’t get any other way, and that information directly translates into targeted therapy that matters. If you are in or around the Destin, Miramar Beach, Santa Rosa Beach, 30A, Seagrove Beach, Watercolor, Sandestin, Seaside, Dune Allen Beach, Blue Mountain Beach, Freeport, Rosemary Beach, Panama City Beach, Fort Walton Beach, Mary Esther, Shalimar, Niceville, Bluewater Bay, Florida areas then give us a call.