Invited Review Article
Japanese guidelines for occupational allergic diseases 2020,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alit.2020.03.010Get rights and content
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Abstract

Occupational allergic diseases are likely to worsen or become intractable as a result of continuous exposure to high concentrations of causative allergens. These are socioeconomically important diseases that can lead to work interruptions for patients and potentially job loss. We published the first guideline for managing occupational allergic diseases in Japan. The original document was published in Japanese in 2013, and the following year (2014) it was published in English. This guideline consists of six chapters about occupational asthma, occupational allergic rhinitis, occupational skin diseases, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, occupational anaphylaxis shock, and the legal aspects of these diseases. Providing general doctors with the knowledge to make evidence-based diagnoses and to understand the occupational allergic disease treatment policies, was a breakthrough in allergic disease treatment.

Due to the discovery of new occupational allergens and the accumulation of additional evidence, we published a revised version of our original article in 2016, and it was published in English in 2017. In addition to including new knowledge of allergens and evidence, the 2016 revision contains a “Flowchart to Diagnosis” for the convenience of general doctors.

We report the essence of the revised guidelines in this paper.

Keywords

Hypersensitivity pneumonitis
Occupational allergic rhinitis
Occupational anaphylaxis
Occupational asthma
Occupational skin diseases

Cited by (0)

This article is an updated version of “Japanese guidelines for occupational allergic diseases 2017” published in Allergol Int 2017:66:265-80.

Peer review under responsibility of Japanese Society of Allergology.

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The members of Japanese Guideline for Diagnosis and Management of Occupational Allergic Disease are listed at Appendix A section.