Choosing the right treatment for allergic dermatitis

In an interview with dvm360 at the 2024 Fetch Long Beach conference in Long Beach, California, Brittany Lancellotti, DVM, DACVD, talked about various current treatment options for allergic dermatitis in animal patients, talking about options for flea allergies, environmental allergies, food allergies, and more. She emphasized, however, the importance of weighing in patients’ individual clinical signs, as their response to different treatments will vary depending on what symptoms they are experiencing. Considering this, the veterinary professional should come up with specific plans tailored for individual patients.

Below is the interview transcript:

Brittany Lancellotti, DVM, DACVD: The treatment options that are available for allergic dermatitis are much more now than we had just a few years ago. In terms of different treatments, we need to think about how the disease presents, so I always like to start by talking to owners about what are the primary triggers, and how am I going to treat those primary triggers? So parasiticides are really important treatment in flea allergies.

Elimination diet trials are the most effective way for diagnosing and managing food allergies, so understanding the different prescription diets that are available is really important as a treatment option for food allergic animals.

And then for environmental allergies, the only treatment that we have that actually addresses the primary disease is allergy-specific immunotherapy, which is best implemented by a board-certified veterinary dermatology specialist who has an understanding of the regional allergens and how to interpret those allergy tests and implement immunotherapy.

But then we have a lot of other symptomatic allergy treatment tools, things like antibiotics, antifungals, as well as antipyretic and ant inflammatory medications like glucocorticoids, cyclosporine, Janus kinase inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies.

So, we've got a lot of different options available to give an animal relief, but it's important to understand what that individual animal’s clinical signs are and how they would best respond to the different treatments that are available, so that you can come up with a specific plan for that patient.