Summary
Introduction. According to the World Allergy Organization, more than 20% of the population in developed countries suffers from allergic diseases. Allergic individuals are characterized by producing immunoglobulin E antibodies against harmless environmental allergens. Conventional methods use allergen extracts to determine specific IgE (sIgE). Extracts are composed of several components, so it is unclear to which specific protein the sensitization is. Also, it is impossible to distinguish cross-reactions due to common IgE epitopes in allergens. For these reasons, the necessity for molecular allergy diagnostics arose. For these reasons, the necessity for molecular allergy diagnostics arose. It is based on identifying allergen components from allergen sources such as pollen, house dust mites, fur animals, food, and so on. Advances in science and technology have opened up the development of molecular in vitro diagnostics and are increasingly used in routine clinical trials. The discrepancies between the results from different tools for determining sensitization have made it necessary to perform a comparative analysis. A patient's medical history is required to properly interpret the sIgE profiles against individual allergen molecules or evaluate which sensitization is clinically relevant.
The aim – to highlight the differences between traditional and molecular allergy diagnostics and to thoroughly analyze molecular allergy diagnostic methods and the features of their use.
Conclusions. After analyzing the latest literature data, it can be concluded that in the presence of symptoms typical of an allergic disease and failing to identify the allergen by traditional methods (SPT and sIgE determination in blood serum), molecular allergy diagnostic tests should be performed.
