Hasbro Children’s Hospital Introduces New Food Allergy Clinic
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Hasbro Children’s Hospital has introduced a new Food Allergy Clinic to help children with the most basic to the most complex food allergy issues. The multi-disciplinary program is led by Vincent Mukkada, MD, pediatric gastroenterologist; Robert Klein, MD, pediatric allergist; and Susan Rudders, MD, pediatric allergist. Recent reports by the Centers for Disease Control found that, in 2007, approximately 3 million children under the age of 18 were reported to have a food or digestive allergy – an 18 percent increase in prevalence over the previous decade. With this growing issue in mind, the newly created clinic will be operated by an allergy-specific team of experts offering one-stop comprehensive analysis and treatment.
One-Stop Shop
By bringing together experts in pediatric gastroenterology, allergy and immunology, nutrition, and psychology, the Food Allergy Clinic is designed to bring multidisciplinary attention to those patients with the most severe, complex cases that cannot be easily diagnosed. “Some allergies are fairly straightforward – peanuts cause a respiratory allergic reaction, or milk causes a gastrointestinal reaction,” said Robert Klein, MD, Hasbro's pediatrician-in-chief and asthma/allergy specialist at the clinic. “Hasbro has always been well equipped to treat these potentially serious reactions. The creation of this new multidisciplinary Food Allergy Clinic allows us to integrate our existing management of straightforward food allergies with a state of the art center devoted to investigating more complicated food-related reactions. This is where we sit a team of experts together in a room and finally pinpoint and treat the problem.”
To Go
The Food Allergy Clinic currently offers one clinic day each week specifically earmarked for the clinical team to come together for multidisciplinary assessments. The team will discuss the complex cases of patients referred to the clinic by another physician who suspects a food is contributing to a patient’s problems. The clinic anticipates seeing 400-600 of these cases per year.
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