Possible therapy takes bite out of peanut allergy:
Those allergy shots that help people allergic to pollen and other environmental triggers reduce or eliminate symptoms — by getting used to small amounts of the allergen — are too risky for food allergies.Enter oral immunotherapy. Twenty-nine severely allergic children spent a day in the hospital swallowing minuscule but slowly increasing doses of a specially prepared peanut flour, until they had a reaction. The child went home with a daily dose just under that reactive amount, usually equivalent to 1/1,000th of a peanut.
After eight to 10 months of gradual dose increases, most can eat the peanut-flour equivalent of 15 peanuts daily, said Burks, who two years ago began reporting these signs of desensitization as long as children took their daily medicine.
Sunday’s report takes the next big step. Nine children who’d taken daily therapy for 2 1/2 years were given a series of peanut challenges. Four in the initial study — and a fifth who finished testing last week — could stop treatment and avoid peanuts for an entire month and still have no reaction the next time they ate 15 whole peanuts. Immune-system changes suggest they’re truly allergy-free, Burks said.
Scientists call that tolerance — meaning their immune systems didn’t forget and go bad again — and it’s a first for food allergy treatment, said Dr. Marshall Plaut of the National Institutes of Health.