Up until 2020, If you loved cats but your allergies didn't love them back, you had to live with runny eyes, hop yourself up on Benadryl, or live a sad cat free life. Now there's something that might reduce the amount of Fel d1 that cats produce! The less Fel d1 in your environment, the less severe your allergic response. Stay tuned at the end for Amy's recap of how Thanksgiving and Christmas went with her allergenic eldest kiddo!

Show Notes:

NIH National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biological Information: Anti-Fel d1 immunoglobulin Y antibody-containing egg ingredient lowers allergen levels in cat saliva by Ebenezer Satyaraj et al.

Very Well Health overview of the paper

In case you're curious, here's the Purina cat food (not sponsored)

Transcript

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Junk. I'm Trace Kerr.

[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Amy Barton. And today we're going to talk all about cat allergies and the people you love who get mucusy and how to solve that problem.

[00:00:18] Speaker A: Okay. Because we need to do this because Beckett's person, Cam, who comes over to visit quite a lot, is slightly allergic, although I think they're improving. And I think I might have read this study. So I have some theories. So let's go.

[00:00:32] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm excited, because this is the thing. So, for those of you who don't have cat allergies, which is 80% to 90% of the population, so high five for you. So ten to 20% of the global population do have an allergy to dogs or cats, cat allergies are twice as common. For those of you blessed with not allergies, it manifests as sneezing, runny nose, sore throat, wheezing skin. My eyes get itchy. Oh, it's not great. And the solutions in these modern times are antihistamines and immunotherapy, which is you go in once a week and you get a shot, and you slowly build up an immunity. So it's just exposure therapy is what it sounded like. Oh, long and slow can take a really long time, and it's expensive. Insurance is like, you could take Benadryl.

[00:01:19] Speaker A: You could just not have a cat.

[00:01:22] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Well, and this would be, too, for, like, if you have a pine allergy and those kinds of things. But their insurance is, maybe it's better, but mine has never been like, oh, yeah, we support that. They're like, benadryl.

Anywho, there is a solution, so here's why the problem happens. There is an allergen that cats have. It's found on their skin, in their urine and saliva. So it's not actually initially their hair that is the problem. The allergen is called. It's a protein called feld one, and they get it on their fur because they lick. And so there's saliva. That sticky allergen sticks everywhere, and it also can be fluffy and airborne and stays in the air for a long time. That dander. So it's not great if you have a cat allergy. Just not being in the room with the cat is not really enough.

[00:02:19] Speaker A: At the height of my catness, we had three, and I have sat next to people out in public who have turned to me and gone, do you have cats? Because I'm stuffy.

[00:02:31] Speaker B: And what's happening there? Their body is responding to the felD1one with an antibody known as IgY.

I didn't look up how to say this. I tried with one, and I'm like, they don't pronounce this, so I'm going to assume. They say IgY. Shall we assume that?

[00:02:49] Speaker A: I feel confident.

[00:02:51] Speaker B: Good. It activates an inflammatory response. Your body is saying, oh, problem. And it's trying to isolate that and uses mucus to do that.

[00:03:01] Speaker A: Mucus.

[00:03:01] Speaker B: Lots of mucus. So the way that I learned about this was a picture of cats and chickens. And people have figured out that when their cats lived with their chickens, they were less allergic to their cats. And so there clearly was enough evidence there, or there was some other scientific way. They're like, we think,