I felt fine until my late 20s, and then the mysterious symptoms struck. Almost overnight, I began to feel constantly tired, foggy, disoriented, and, well, stupid. Each spring, friends with allergies nodded in agreement, pointing out their own malaise, often along with sneezes and scratchy throats. That didn’t totally make sense to me, though, because I felt bad year-round. Could it be I’d developed allergies to something more permanent—like dust mites, ficus trees, or animal dander?
It took me three years of research and tests to find the answer. But along the way, I learned something far more shocking. If you’re not like me, you could be someday, and you’ll have to work pretty hard to find the culprit. More people than ever are suffering from symptoms that could be the result of adult-onset allergies—or something worse.
It's not just you who's suddenly having seasonal allergies
The World Allergy Organization reports that the prevalence of allergies has risen in industrialized countries over the past 50 years. In 2018 alone, more than 19 million adults in the U. S. were diagnosed with hay fever (known as allergic rhinitis), according to the CDC. Meng Chen, M.D., an allergist at Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research, says her office is seeing more cases each day. “It’s something I oftentimes hear from patients—‘I’ve never had allergies, and all of a sudden, I, an adult, have developed all of these allergies,’ ” she says. What the heck is going on?
For one thing, the world is warming up, and that leads to longer allergy seasons— as much as 27 days longer, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Then there’s all the moving around we do—the average 30-year-old will have already moved about six times in their life. If some resident in your building has cats, or your new bedroom faces a field of sagebrush, you may develop a reaction you’ve never experienced before.
For any allergy, the reason you get symptoms—whether they’re the visible ones like sneezing and watery eyes or the more internal ones like brain fog—is that your body produces antibodies to fight the allergen. Your antibodies, for some yet-to-be-understood reason, classify the molecules of what you just inhaled as pathogens and seek to destroy them. To do that, your immune system releases certain toxin-fighting chemicals, such as histamines, that kick off the allergic response. Even after the compound is gone, the antibodies hang out in your body like sentries, always on the lookout for its return. “Every time you’re exposed to that allergen, your immune system learns better and faster ways to attack it,” says Caroline Sokol, M.D., Ph.D., the principal investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases.
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Allergists don’t yet know why some people are affected by constant exposure to a potential allergen while others aren’t. It’s a biological false alarm. However, the rise of adult-onset allergies can be particularly vexing because sufferers had been fine for years. Or at least they appeared that way. “When people move to a new place, it usually takes at least a couple of seasons [for the full-blown response] to develop,” says Dr. Chen.
Let’s say you’re a lifelong Angeleno who moves to New York, where birch trees are everywhere. When spring rolls around, your immune system may respond to the new factor in the air. It takes a week or two to develop all the antibodies specific to each pollen. By the time those antibodies make it through your whole body, the irritant could be gone and symptoms won’t get a chance to show up, says Dr. Sokol. So you’ll have no idea you’ve been primed to launch an allergic response.
That same thing will happen the next year, only more quickly, although you still might not see symptoms. “But you better believe that your body’s not going to forget about it in your third birch-pollen season,” says Dr. Sokol. “The next year, your allergy cells are primed for attack, and you are miserable from the first day of birch-pollen exposure to the last day.”
This is also true for new exposures to pet dander, or foods that you eat on occasion. “Once that immune response starts, it can be hard to stop,” says Dr. Sokol.
How to know what you're allergic to
Since it takes a while for the allergy to build up and hammer you, it can take a while to track down what’s driving it. You don’t have to know exactly which grass or tree is your nemesis—dosing up with OTC allergy medication can usually squelch symptoms (discover how to keep symptoms to a minimum here).
Another path, which I took, is to visit an allergist. I got tested for 46 different allergens, and all but one—a slight allergy to dust mites—came back negative.
I decided to try OTC medications and rolled through a few, none of which had any effect on me whatsoever. After months of that, my allergist offered another diagnosis altogether: What I likely had was an almost-allergy. In some people, artificial fragrances create symptoms that mimic an allergic reaction, but they’re not actually allergies. I probably was hypersensitive to some manufactured scents and perfumes.
It might be a chemical sensitivity, not an allergy
Allergies are an immune-system reaction to an organic substance, while synthetic-fragrance reactions are considered sensitivities, and they work differently. Instead of causing an immune-system response, the fragrance particles stick in your airways and irritate them, just like what would happen if you inhaled a plume of black pepper, says Dr. Sokol. Companies add scents to everything from trash bags to laundry detergent these days. At least 51 million adults also suffer because of it, according to a report in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. That’s up 200 percent in the past decade.
Unlike with allergies, there’s no test to narrow down which synthetic substance you’re sensitive to. And typical allergy treatments won’t do anything for you. But you can control these sensitivities: Today, I only buy products with packaging that explicitly says “100 percent natural” or “unscented.”
For more-standard allergy sufferers, there are other ways to allergen-proof your life. There’s no magic fabric to help shed pollen or dander, so wear what you want, but when you come indoors, take off your shoes and put the clothes you’re not washing immediately in a sealed bin. Shower right away to get offending particles off your body, especially your hair. We can’t all control what we’re allergic to, but maybe you can do me and millions of others a favor and use unscented soap and shampoo. Bless you.