While it can be tempting to take both an oral antihistamine and a nasal spray, it’s usually “a waste of money”, says Glenis Scadding, vice president of the non-profit Euforea, which focuses on research and education around allergies, and honorary consultant allergist and rhinologist at University College Hospital London in the UK. “Oral antihistamines make very little difference to a nasal corticosteroid,” she says.
4. Start your treatment before allergy season begins
Don’t wait until you feel symptoms to start using your nasal spray: starting a few weeks before the season begins has the best outcomes. In one trial, hay fever sufferers who started using intranasal corticosteroids four weeks before pollen season did better than those who started using the spray only on seeing symptoms, for example.
5. Apply it regularly – even on days you don’t have symptoms
“When people say [these medications] are ineffective, it’s usually for one of two reasons,” says Durham. “Either they’re not taking them properly, or they’re not taking them regularly.”
Use your treatment at the same time each day, whether or not you are experiencing symptoms. It’s also important to follow dosing instructions: the trial of combined corticosteroid-antihistamine spray found the greatest symptom reduction in those who used it twice – rather than once – a day.
6. Make sure you are properly administrating nasal sprays…
Even when we choose an effective nasal spray, many of us are applying it wrong. A common error is to jam the bottle as high up in our nose as it will go, tilt our heads back, spray, and then sniff – all of which directs the medicine towards the back of the throat. But it needs to be in the nose to work.
