For the past year researchers at Duke University have been putting daily doses of a peanut solution under the tongues of children with allergies. So far they have found that these children have built up a tolerance to the allergen, while children who were receiving a placebo remained unchanged.
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The children who received the treatment could tolerate the equivalent of five to seven peanuts compared to those who received a placebo and tolerated less than one peanut.
“The good news is that we have successfully helped these kids tolerate about five peanuts and that means accidental ingestion is less of a hazard,” Said Wesley Burks, M.D., Chief of the Division of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at Duke and senior author of the study. It is not a long-term cure, that part of the process is still being studied now.
There is another way that researchers are trying to get children to overcome allergies which is by receiving a shot.
To address the problem of allergy, participants spent the first 12 weeks of the study receiving monthly or bi-monthly shots of omalizumab, which is a powerful anti-lgE medication that was chosen for its effectiveness in treating allergic asthma and because it rarely presents side effects.
Because this protocol is a treatment and not a cure, the study participants immune systems are still producing the antibodies that cause their allergies but in a much lower amount. To keep those antibody amounts at safe levels, participants need to eat peanuts daily to keep their bodies “used to them,” otherwise production of the allergy triggering antibodies is likely to increase.
