Short Time Efficiency of Rhinophototherapy in Management of Patients with Allergic Rhinitis Resistant to Medical Therapy.

Allergic rhinitis is one of the most common health problems with a major effect on the quality of life. We intended to treat Allergic Rhinitis (AR) in patients who are either unresponsive to antihistamines or their job requires optimal alertness that may be disturbed by antihistamine's side effects and those who do not comply with the regular use. We tried short term phototherapy and evaluated its effect on AR. As phototherapy is effective in the treatment of atopic dermatitis (AD) and the same allergens can produce both AD and AR, phototherapy is proposed as a new tool in the AR treatment. In AD, phototherapy causes induction of apoptosis in infiltrating T cells and other immunomodulatory effects. We performed a randomized single-blind study to investigate the effect of low-dose phototherapy in AR patients. Among AR patients who did not respond to local and systemic therapy, we chose 62 allergic patients all above 25 years of age with moderate to severe AR whose disease was verified by allergy skin test or specific IgE to allergens; then, they were randomly divided into 31 patients as treatment group and 31 patients as control group. In treatment groups, we used a mixture of UVA, UVB and visible light. In the control group, we used visible light alone as placebo. Then we evaluated the level of response to treatment in two groups and compared them according to Total Nasal Symptom scores (TNSS) and Global Severity Scores (GSS) and Rhinoconjunctivitis Quality of Life Questionnaires (RQLQ) symptom scores. We found out that phototherapy in the treatment group in comparison with placebo was effective in treatment of AR (p-value <0.001). However, we recommend that for substantiation of the claim, further investigations are still required.