Find Out if Your Runny Nose is Caused by Allergies or a Virus
Is your runny nose caused by seasonal allergies or something more serious like a virus? In this episode of We Nose Noses, Dr. Smith and Dr. Reddy walk you through how to tell the difference using timing, symptoms, and simple at-home clues. Learn what your runny nose is trying to tell you and what to do next for faster relief.
What you’ll learn:
- How the timing and seasonality of symptoms point to allergies vs. viral infections.
- Key symptom differences like nasal discharge, fever, and other body signs.
- Treatment strategies for managing allergies, viruses, or a combination of both.
Dr. Smith
Hi guys, welcome back to the We Nose Noses podcast. I am Dr. Smith joined here with Dr. Reddy. And today we’re going to talk about a common question that we get in the office, which is, how do I know if my runny nose is due to the allergies or is this something more like a virus?
So first, i’ll you know we get patients that come in And talk about, I have a stuffy, congested nose. I think it’s allergies. But I’m not sure is, it doesn’t seem to be the right time of the year for me to but normally get my allergies.
Dr. Reddy, do you want to talk a little bit about like what patient might come in complaining about with these types of…
Dr. Reddy
Yeah. So a lot of this is based off of just the history and, um, you know, one, one component of the history is timing.
So patients with allergies, if they have allergies to something in the environment, that’s outdoors, they generally will have a seasonal component to it. So they might have allergies to grass pollen, for example, and their symptoms might be more in the summertime.
And then for patients that have indoor allergies, they might have more like all year-round symptoms or symptoms where they’re in indoors more like in the wintertime from things like dust mites and mold.
And when patients have a runny nose or a stuffy nose from a virus, it may not line up with that same seasonality. It might just be at a different time. It might be from a recent exposure to somebody sick, like a sick contact, or might they might have a sick child at home, or they may have traveled and been exposed to a lot of sick people in the airport or airplane.
So one component is timing. Do want go over another component?
Dr. Smith
For sure. So timing is definitely a big thing. We start to think about, what other symptoms might they have, right? So additional symptoms and this can be a scratchy sore throat, a cough, ear pressure and and congestion, fevers, chills, sweats, those types of symptoms that might not be so allergy, might be more viral and and related.
So we want to know other associated things that might be going on, any stomach pain, any loose bowels or anything else that’s going severe headaches. Because those things typically don’t go along with allergy type symptoms. So typically we want to know those things as well.
Dr. Reddy, do you have anything else?
Dr. Reddy
So the other thing if you have a nasal discharge what kind of discharge is coming out. So for example, with allergies, the classic allergy type of discharge is thin and watery type of drainage coming out of the nose, requires you to constantly be dabbing your nose, maybe some sneezing and itchiness. Itchiness is a really common symptom for nasal allergies.
In contrast, if you look at virus, a runny nose from a virus, the drainage tends to be usually a little bit more thicker and might be more, we call it mucoid.
So it’s like a thicker, like phlegm type drainage. Usually, in the beginning, it’s usually a white colored, and then it can start turning into different colors like yellow and green as time goes on.
Dr. Smith
Yeah, absolutely. So all those questions, and I know we beat this before, but history really does make some of the you know the most important kind of clues as to trying to figure some of this thing out, if this is viral, if it’s allergy. You know, of course, if you look outside and your car is covered in yellow dust, and you’re just starting to get some of these symptoms, that timing, as Dr. Reddy alluded to, can be really big trying to figure out, is this more allergy?
But if your car’s yellow and you’re having fevers, chills, cough, and these runny nose symptoms, then probably not allergies, probably viral. And so asking about, know pets at home kids at home who might be in daycare those are all tips if you’re a teacher sometimes work. I often ask patients what they do for a living because that can sometimes tip okay could this be more viral could this be more allergy or irritant related from work exposure um timing of the year for viruses we normally like to think that viruses kind of peak in in at least in our area in more of like the indoor colder months and so you’re talking so November to kind of March, April, and then viruses start to flatten out typically um so timing of the year can also be a big thing do you want to talk about a little bit of the difference as far as like our kind of supportive care and treatment options for the two of those.
Dr. Reddy
Yeah, so with viruses, if you have a viral infection, it’s mostly supportive care.
You generally don’t want to do antibiotics. You do things like hydration and humidification. You can do steam face mask steam inhalation, which is really popular these days. You can do nasal sprays like Flonase. You can do sinus rinses like saltwater saline irrigations.
Sometimes in severe cases where if you’re really kind of miserable, you can do short courses of oral steroids, but we try to avoid that unless we really need to. And then the allergy management is all the allergy medications, things like allergy nasal sprays, like as a lasting or Flonase, you know, allergy medication by mouth, like an antihistamine, Claritin, Zyrtec, Allegra are some of the more common ones.
And, you know, it’s actually really common for us to see patients where they have a little bit of both going on too. So what, what frequently happens is you can have a chronic history of allergies, which kind of sets the stage in your nose for chronic inflammation.
And then whenever your nose is chronically inflamed, it’s much more likely to be affected by a viral exposure than somebody who doesn’t have that stage that’s set from chronic inflammation from allergies.
And so it’s really common to got to have like a baseline level of allergies and all of a sudden you get an exacerbation of your symptoms from like a viral exposure. And so we kind of have to treat both.
Dr. Smith
Yep. One other thing that you can do over the counter too, which we, at least I know I don’t recommend all that often, but decongestants.
So over the counter, you can get topical decongestants like afrin or neosinephrine. You can also do oral decongestants like phenylephrine and pseudephedrine, and they have kind of varying degrees of success.
The one thing I will often caution patients is for like viral infections, the decongestants typically work pretty well because it’s an acute problem. So it usually lasts 24 to 48 hours where you get severe congestion.
And so just fighting through that that acute phase from the virus can really help. And it’s uncommon that patients would get, quote, addicted to nasal decongestants during a viral infection.
But if you start using them for chronic congestion, that but we see an irritant and rhinitis or allergic rhinitis or stuffy congestion, patients often kind of get this addiction to it where they need to continue to use it because those decongestants do help, but they don’t necessarily fix the problem.
So the one thing from an allergy standpoint is we don’t always want to just fix the congestion. We want to try to do things that maybe prevent the allergic reaction from happening.
And so often we’ll have patients either get allergy testing or use allergy medications more consistently to try to avoid the need for nasal decongestants in those times.
Dr. Reddy
Yep. Very good. Yeah, I think that’s all I have to add.
Dr. Smith
Yeah, excellent. So yeah, we went over the three big things that, you know, the the irritants, the viruses and the allergies. And, you know, just think about when you come to see a doctor or a physician, just think about the other kind of things that you may think, oh, I just have a stuffy nose.
But try to think about all the other history points that we talked about that might make it seem one more likely that it might be viral versus allergy. And that should help.
All right. Well, thank you guys. Here’s been another episode on the We Nose Noses podcast. Thanks for joining.
If neither allergies nor acute infections explain persistent sinus symptoms, chronic sinusitis could be the cause – and in some cases sinus surgery may be needed for lasting relief.
