Urticaria and dietary hypersensitivity

Abstract

The concept of dietary hypersensitivity once highly fashionable in medical circles, spas and watering places was soon derided when the era of scientific investigation in medicine opened. Nevertheless such theories have gained fresh respectability with the introduction of precise techniques for measuring antibodies to immunogenic constituents of the diet. The unequivocal demonstration of gluten hypersensitivity in coeliac disease has aroused suspicions that other antigens may induce similar disorders albeit less florid in their mode of presentation. Moreover dietary hypersensitivity has been incriminated in a wide range of chronic gastrointestinal diseases appearing for the first time in societies which are in the process of adopting a highly sophisticated standard of living, including a change in dietary habits. Indeed other diseases now endemic in developed countries such as myocardial infarction have been attributed to dietary antigens (Davies et al., 1974). Whilst such claims may often have been exaggerated, the striking discrepancy between the incidence of certain diseases in relatively primitive communities and in advanced, urban societies draws attention to the possible importance of environmental factors including dietary ones. A noteworthy example is the paucity of inflammatory arthritis, and in particular rheumatoid arthritis, in rural populations of Bantu Africans (Beighton et al., 1975).