How Do Antihistamines Help Your Allergy Symptoms?
This article is a transcript.
What do antihistamines do? I'm Dr. Manan Shah with Wyndly Health, I'm an ENT and an allergist. When your body is exposed to one of your allergy triggers, you release a molecule called histamine. Histamine is a vasodilator, meaning it makes your blood vessels get bigger. This leads to more blood flow to the area and it helps your body create more mucus to wash the allergy trigger out, it helps your eyes tear to also wash the allergy trigger out, and it helps you sneeze or itch to try to rub or blow the allergy trigger out.
An antihistamine is a medication that blocks histamine from being released. This improves your allergy symptoms for the duration of the time that the antihistamine is in your body. It's not a long-term solution, but they're a great allergy medication for short-term relief. If you'd like to learn more, please subscribe.
