For the purpose of the examination of allergen in nasal allergy, skin test and RAST are performed, and the nasal provocation test is also examined.
In order to examine and determine the allergen using a disc the nasal provocation test was conducted with 50 patients, 113 allergens in total, suffering from nasal allergy or vasomotoric rhinitis.
As a method of the examination, placing allergen disc at the anterior part of the inferior turbinal, observing the different symptoms appearing within 5 to 10 minutes after provocation, and simultaneously the temperature in nasal mucosa before and after provocation was measured.
The change of the temperature after provocation showed the correlation with skin test, but the concordance rate showed a low value. Moreover, it showed a good correlation with eosinophilia and with the frequency of the symptoms which appeared after provocation was made and concordance rate was high. The change of temperature showed a good correlation with the results of RAST score.
As mentioned above, the nasal provocation test is useful to determine allergen, and by giving the change of the temperature the diagnosis is more accurate than the mere observation of the symptoms. It may be used for the judgement of the efficacy of the hyposensitisation and the effect of the medicaments.