Every day, Doctor Jimmy Mohamed answers your questions and reacts to health news.

This Thursday, he responds to a listener who thinks she is allergic to kiwis.

Food allergies, which are on the rise in Europe, can have signs that you cannot always imagine.

DECRYPTION

A listener from Europe 1 wonders: her tongue burns her every time she eats a kiwi.

Could this be the sign of a food allergy?

How to identify them?

Doctor Jimmy Mohamed answered this question asked Thursday in the program Sans rendez-vous on Europe 1.

Symptomatic signs of an allergy

"A burning tongue, it can be integrated into the symptom of oral allergy", according to Jimmy Mohamed, who recalls that food allergies are on the rise in Europe: they affect 6% of children and 3% of adults.

"Everyone knows the classic allergy symptoms: hives, it swells, it itches. But we can also simply have very discreet signs, which always come back for the same foods. Kiwi fruit is also one of the foods that can cause allergies frequently. You can have itching, small stings, or even a kind of rhinitis as if you were allergic to pollen ", details the doctor on Europe 1.

>> Find all of Sans rendez-vous in replay and podcast here

Dermatological tests

But don't panic: as a general rule, "this does not cause a severe reaction because the most serious anaphylactic reaction occurs in only 1% of cases".

In 10% of cases, the allergy still manifests itself by signs that should not be overlooked.

For this, "we can make an investigation with dermatological tests: we take, for example, a little kiwi flesh that we put on the skin", comments the doctor.

These tests are effective in detecting an allergy but the problem is that they are "not very specific. If you react positively, it can be a kiwi allergy, but also to something else because there are cross allergies", underlines Jimmy Mohamed.

While these food allergies can start in adulthood, they appear more frequently during childhood.

Note that there is the "kiss allergy syndrome" specifies Jimmy Mohamed: if you are allergic to kiwi, "and you kiss someone who has eaten a kiwi, you can trigger an allergy symptom" .