How to Identify & Determine a Casein Allergy

When your immune system reacts to casein, a milk protein, as if it is a pathogen, this is called a casein allergy. Casein is found in curds of milk and makes up to 4 percent of milk content. Essentially, if you have a casein allergy, you have a milk allergy. Milk allergies are often confused with lactose intolerance. If you are lactose or milk intolerant, you do not have the enzymes necessary to break down the lactose sugar in milk and often have stomach troubles if you consume milk products. Below are the steps to identify and diagnose a casein allergy.

Instructions

• 1

  Recognize the allergy symptoms. Immediately after drinking milk or eating milk products, you may notice nausea, skin irritation or wheezing. Hours later, you may notice abdominal cramps, an itchy skin rash around the mouth or nasal congestion. Some people even develop loose stools that often contain blood.

• 2

  Once you notice the allergy symptoms, start keeping a food diary. Start writing down everything you ingest each day and any allergy symptoms that appear. This will help you keep track of what you are eating, how you feel and how long it takes for any symptoms to occur. After checking your food diary, you can determine if your symptoms are coming from milk products or from some other culprit in your diet.

• 3

  Remove milk products from your diet for a week. If you do not have any allergy symptoms during this time, it is a strong indication that you may have a casein allergy.

• 4

  See your doctor. After you explain your concerns and the reasoning behind them, he will give you a thorough physical exam to make sure that there is not some other health condition causing your allergy symptoms. If he feels it is necessary, your doctor will perform allergy tests to diagnose your casein allergy. He may take blood to test for the antibodies to casein in your blood stream. Blood tests are not definitive diagnostic tools for a casein allergy, so even if the blood test does not show casein antibodies, you doctor may continue to test you. A skin test is where a small, purified amount of casein allergen is injected or pricked into your skin to see if it will develop an allergic reaction.