[strontian]

nice! I recently got dust mites out of my home completely, and it was a miraculous upgrade to my health, including several symptoms that are outside the definitions of allergic asthma/eczema/rhinitis.

One important thing people are missing about dust mite allergy is the many ways in which they directly damage your immune system and body, outside of the usual frame of "allergies" which is based on type 2 hypersensitivity.

This article is a great introduction to the harms they cause at the molecular level: https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(18)30848-0/ful...

I also wrote a free guide to help people get dust mites out of their house:

https://dustmiteguide.com

[ovalanche]

I’m really glad to see this side discussion on dust mite allergy happening here. I’ve had dust mite allergy since childhood, and I even had adenoid removal surgery at age ~7 to address it. Nothing seems to help.

I think dust mite allergy imitates some of the symptoms of sleep apnea, because your nasal passage gets blocked at night, waking you in a similar way to choking.

I’ve reached my mid-30s, largely ignoring the symptoms, but over the past few months I’ve been experiencing a truly terrible bout of insomnia.

I think it’s time to take the allergy seriously again. I’ll follow your guide and make some changes. If I could suggest an improvement to your guide: it may be useful to have a section (perhaps chapter 5?) on symptom relief. I’ve had friends say that a neti pot works wonders, for example.

Either way thanks for posting!

[grumpy-de-sre]

There's an interesting "subcategory" of sleep apnea under the moniker of UARS. I'm pretty confident that a big chunk of folks in that community actually have allergenic rhinitis (or structural issues).

I actually had a home sleep study done before I figured out it was allergies. Came back negative for OSA but my RIP [1] band data showed a lot of paradoxical breathing and flow limitation indicating significant respiratory effort. So more or less struggling to breathe all night long.

The poor sleep quality really destroys your quality of life.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_inductance_plethys...

[natdempk]

Appreciate the resource -- I think my biggest question from reading it: How can you actually tell if you have dust mite problems? How can you tell if they've gotten better or not? How can I tell if I've hit a point where things are about as good as they're going to get? etc.

[strontian]

I have asthma symptoms from dust mites, and discovered that sniffing items creates a reaction in my lungs that is pretty sensitive to the amount of allergen in the item. Dust mite allergens also have a distinct but subtle smell you can learn.

Regarding whether or not your health issues are caused by dust mites, if you have any of the allergic disease, or if you have a tested dust mite allergy, it is likely they are causing problems. Disease severity is also associated with dust mite exposure.

Basically, the worse you have allergies, the more likely it's dust mites.

It's an almost certainty you home has dust mites and their allergens, unless you live in a very dry climate.

My advice is to create conditions in your house in which dust mites cannot thrive, which is relatively easy to verify with hygrometers. Over time, this will lead to lead to lower allergen levels, particularly if you are proactive about removing the ones that are currently there.

[Projectiboga]

Another simple hack is to exit your outside the home outer clothes when you get home. There are virulent extra allergic dust mites, that has really helped my family. And these products can help with laundry at lower temps and harder to launder items. https://elfbrands.com/collections/elf-brands

[jrgoff]

I tried to send a message to your the feedback email address on your dustmite guide site but gmail told me it was undeliverable because the address was not found.

What I emailed about was asking what you meant by biweekly for washing bedding - is that twice a week or every other week?

[strontian]

In the early days, populations of eggs and protonymphs are high and perhaps you haven't learned to control humidity in different weather conditions, washing 2x a week will be effective imho.

But if you can maintain low humidity for a longer periods, the dust mite populations in your home will go down and frequent washing will be less important.

[strontian]

thanks for letting me know my email fwding is not working. Twice a week. Be sure to wash as hot as your machine can do. I found that the highest setting on my front loading LG washer does 158f and is more effective than the next hottest setting.

[yard2010]

I have to write this here it might help someone: I had the worst case of mite allergy since childhood - no smells let alone no breathing from my nose. 5 years ago I started immunotherapy - my good dr basically injected me with the allergen every week for 1-2 years. After that, I got a monthly injection with the max dosage for like a year. I haven't had this allergy ever since. I can smell again and breathe from my nose. My dr has healed this awful disease.

Modern medicine sometimes works like magic. If you have this disease know that you don't have to suffer this bs. Try to fix it with the help of your dr.