Managing allergies often requires a multi-pronged effort that limits your exposure, as much as possible, to your particular allergens. This can be easy if, say, peanuts are an issue, but decidedly more difficult if pollen, dust mites, or mold are your enemies.
As you take steps to keep your environment free and clear of allergens, does it make sense to extend these efforts to your bedding? That depends upon whether your allergens are lurking where you sleep.
At Regional Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Center, our team helps clients come up with comprehensive allergy management plans, from testing to treatments. As part of these efforts, we also focus on trigger management, which means controlling your exposure to your allergens.
If you’re wondering whether hypoallergenic bedding can play a role in these efforts, here are some points to consider.
Of all the rooms in your house, your bedroom should be your sanctuary, but this may not be the case if you have allergies. One study collected vacuumed-out dust from 7,000 bedrooms and found at least one allergen in nearly all of the samples, and 3-6 allergens in three-quarters of the samples.
The most common bedroom allergy culprits include:
Of course, other allergens can find their way into bedrooms, such as pollen through open windows.
Of the allergens we list above, the ones that hypoallergenic bedding is designed to protect against are mites and bedbugs.
No matter how clean you may keep your bedroom, we assure you that dust mites do exist in your pillows and in your mattresses.
For the 20 million people in the United States who have allergies to dust mites, sleeping with the little critters is not ideal. That’s where hypoallergenic bedding comes in.
This bedding creates a barrier between you and whatever lurks inside your mattress and pillow. Dust mites feed off of dead skin cells, so this barrier traps the mites on one side and keeps your skin on the other. As a result, you can keep the dust mite population to a minimum since they can’t feed easily.
As well, hypoallergenic bedding is designed not to retain moisture, which helps your mattresses and pillows “breathe” more. This can help eliminate the stuffy, warm environments that dust mites, bedbugs, and mold prefer.
So, if you have a known allergy to dust mites, bedbugs, or mold, hypoallergenic bedding can play a role in managing your allergies, but a limited role.
There are other steps you can take to manage allergies in the bedroom, including:
If you’d like to learn more about ways in which you can better manage your allergies, we invite you to contact us at one of our locations in Kingsport or Johnson City, Tennessee, or Abingdon, Virginia.
