Adventures of an Allergist Mommy

The other day, my 7 year old son came home from school excited to tell me about his day. His second-grade class had just begun a unit in science about the human body. As an introduction to the unit, his teacher asked the students to name organ systems. One child called out, "the gut", and another, "the lungs". But not my child. No, my kid offered up "the immune system"! Here's the book he took from my office to read to his class: http://primaryimmune.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Our-Immune-System.pdf "Our Immune System", by Sara LeBien Obviously, I'm biased by both genetics and profession. But I couldn't be prouder. :-)

Over the past few years, it has become increasingly common for physicians to recommend saline nasal lavage (or sinus rinsing) to patients. The concept that rinsing allergens and pollutants out of the sinonasal cavities will decrease inflammation is certainly an attractive one. Patients, especially those with chronic sinusitis, would report getting gobs of ugly mucous out with each rinse- so the exercise was cathartic, as well. So, it was an easy step to go from recommending "as needed" use to recommending daily preventative use. Turns out, it may have been a step off a cliff. A recent study from Georgetown University Hospital School of Medicine suggests that although as-needed use of saline irrigation is beneficial, daily long-term use of nasal saline irrigation (NSI) by patients with recurrent rhinosinusitis (RS) can increase the frequency of acute infection by as much as 60%. Why is this? The researchers postulate that daily sinus irrigation depletes the sinonasal cav...