Tim
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 Posted: 12/28/06 - 17:21 Post subject: Overcoming allergies is possible |
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Elizabeth White encountered peanut allergy at the age of 1, when she was given a nibble of a peanut butter cracker. Within minutes, her airways got swollen and shut and she started grasping for air. Such a small amount of peanut was enough to trigger a severe allergic reaction and lead a toddler to a life-threatening situation.
At the age of 4 ½, her parents enrolled her in a groundbreaking experiment that was conducted to test if eating small amounts of the very foods that triggered allergic reactions could train children's bodies to overcome severe food allergies.
Allergies to environmental triggers like pollen have already been treated with shots called immunotherapy in which the patients were injected with small amounts of the allergen. This was supposed to build up patients' tolerance and reduce or eliminate allergic symptoms. However, such treatment was too dangerous for food allergies and the researchers decided to try another approach- oral immunotherapy.
A child would spend a day at the hospital where it would be given minuscule but increasing doses of either an egg powder or defatted peanut flour. They would start with a minimal amount and increase it until the child broke out in hives.
Then they would be sent home where they would be taking their daily dose that would be just under that reactive amount. Every two weeks, they would be coming to the hospital for an increased dosage to build up tolerance.
Two years after regularly taking their daily dosages, four of the seven youngsters in the egg pilot study could eat two scrambled eggs with no problem and six children from the peanut allergy could tolerate 15 peanuts.
One of the main reasons the study was conducted was to make the children protected from accidentally taking a bite of the forbidden foods, which was no rare occasion.
Researchers are warning that such experiments should under no circumstances be carried out at homes since children were monitored in the hospital for the real risk of life-threatening reactions.
Further research is still needed to seek better evidence for the treatment. It is still not known if the protection would last if the kids stopped taking their daily dosages some time after the initial treatment.
Blood tests have also showed that people who tolerate higher doses had lower blood levels of immunoglobulin-E, which is the key to immune cells' overreaction to allergens. |
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