İlaç Alerjisine Tanısal Yaklaşım

Drug allergies are serious acute and potentially life-threatening reactions that constitute 10-15% of all drug-related adverse reactions. In clinical practice, parents may wrongly report various adverse drug reactions their children experienced as a drug allergy. Physicians often make the diagnosis of a drug allergy based on patient or caregiver accounts rather than standard diagnostic tests. Thus, only a suspicion of a drug allergy is usually enough to make a diagnosis and to prescribe an alternative drug that is generally more expensive and less effective, with more potential side effects. A detailed clinical history of the reaction should be the first step in patients with a suspicion of drug allergy. If the drug allergy cannot be excluded with the clinical history, skin tests and further in vitro tests should be performed. In patients in whom these tests are not informative or not available, a drug allergy diagnosis should be made with a drug provocation test, the gold standard, unless there is a contraindication.