Food allergies are very common in humans across the world. There has been a substantial increase in food allergies recently and healthcare experts are trying to figure out ways to prevent such allergic reactions in humans. One of the greatest allergy-causing foods is peanut. Many people react adversely when they consume peanut or peanut-related food items.
A new immunotherapy developed by a team of researchers from Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Australia show that the therapy may be quite effective against peanut allergies. The experts have claimed that the effects of the therapy last for over four years.
This means that people with the allergy can consume peanuts without showing any adverse effects even after four years of having undergone the treatment.
What is the research about?
The study involved a group of children, all of whom were allergic to peanuts. The researchers provided the immunotherapy to these children, which mainly included a dose of probiotics along with small portions of peanuts. These small doses of peanuts gradually trained the body to forego the Allergic Reactions.
Allergic reactions to peanuts are caused because of the body’s inability to register peanut as food and instead attack it as a foreign object. This leads to increased white blood cells activity and inflammation around the throat and mouth.
Severe cases may cause the throat to swell up so much, that air to the lungs is cut off and may lead to asphyxiation.
In this new immunotherapy treatment, doctors slowly conditioned the children’s bodies to not register peanuts as a foreign body. The probiotics were used to ensure that the stomach can digest the peanuts without triggering an immune response.
Methods such as these have also been posited before, which scientists believe could make peanut allergies non-existent or less severe in case of anaphylactic shock.
What did the results reveal?
The research showed that those kids who received the immunotherapy treatment for 18 months revealed noticeable changes when it came to peanut allergies.
82 percent of the children receiving the treatment showed reduced signs of the allergies. However, what is even more surprising is the fact that 67 percent of the kids who got the therapy revealed to be eating peanuts without any perceivable problems after four years of the treatment, compared to just 4 percent of the children who did not get the treatment.
Even the children who received treatment and still had peanut allergies showed that their allergic reactions were far lesser than the reactions of those children who did not receive the treatment. Fewer treated children showed effects from skin prick tests with a peanut allergen. These results are promising and may show a way through which food allergies can be nullified or controlled.
