Beware of the Headlines

The recent news explosion in the allergy world titled:

Landmark Study May Change How We Feed Peanut Butter To Infants

High-Risk Infants Fed Peanuts Developed Allergy At Lower Rate Than Other 

Babies - Study May Pave Way for New Prevention Strategies

http://community.kidswithfoodallergies.org/blog/landmark-study-may-change-how-we-feed-peanut-butter-to-infants-to-prevent-peanut-allergy

Reading these headlines, one may think that the allergy problems have been solved. But when we read the article further we come across the following sentence.

“First, every child in this study underwent skin prick testing and physician -supervised oral challenge towards peanut before eating it at home for the first time. About 10% of possible study participants were deemed too risky to enroll due to the large size (greater than 4 millimeter) of their skin test,” he noted.

So yes, the results are great and very encouraging for the children who are either negative (i.e. were not allergic to peanuts in the first place, but had eczema and perhaps another dietary allergy) or those who were moderately positive and hence at risk of developing a full on peanut allergy. However, for the children who already had an allergy this is not the right way to go.

There is current research work underway by certain exceptional people to try to solve the allergy problem for the children who have an allergy from the time they are born. Something myself as well as many other parents unfortunately have seen since birth. When my daughter was born, she was exclusively breastfed, but she started having reactions and I started noting what I eat. So by the time she was eligible for an allergy test at 6-months, I already knew what her allergies were and the test results were just a confirmation. By then, I've already eliminated all of those triggers from my own diet. This is not a unique story, this is a story that I've heard from a number of other moms.  This really points to the fact that we need to re-write all of our books when it comes to feeding.

However, something that we did was when my daughter got a bit older, I can't recall the exact age, but would guess about 11-12 months. What I started doing is introducing one food item at a time to my diet for a week. If all goes well, I would give it to her directly the following week. She did outgrow a number of her former allergies, but there are still certain ones that had given her the most severe reaction, which are still an issue.  The next step is trying them in cooked form. But of course, this is all under supervision both my own and her allergist.  There are also more tests available today that can help break down the components further.  I think slowly but surely, we'll tackle them one by one. But it is not a simple process and nothing is guaranteed.

Some truly inspirational work that I've come across has been done by Dr. Kari Nadeau, a must-read NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/can-a-radical-new-treatment-save-children-with-severe-allergies.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Link to her Research Page:

http://nadeaulab.stanford.edu/research.html

She truly is my hero. And has been my inspiration in the whole process. She is very open about the difficulty of Immunotherapy to foods both on the medical as well as financial / political side.  Dr. Nadeau went without salary for 3 years to conduct her studies, because funding for research was minimal compared to the typical drug company-sponsored research. 

Just to give you a sense of the magnitude of her undertaking and the precision of the allergen doses required for immunotherapy, I'm posting this excerpt:

Nadeau experimented with blood samples of allergic patients and was encouraged to see that the allergens seemed not to interact with one another. She consulted with senior colleagues in the field to see if anyone would collaborate on a multiallergen study, but no one was interested. Scientifically the results would be harder to interpret than single-allergen trials. Moreover, each allergen would require getting separate F.D.A. approval, and it was difficult to get even one application approved. When she found herself home sick in bed with a virus for a few days in 2011, she decided she would “knock them all out” and wrote 13 Investigational New Drug Applications, each 90 or so pages long, and soon received F.D.A. approval for each one.

Even more daunting was the question of how to finance the study. Each child would cost between $20,000 and $30,000 to treat annually, and treatment could take several years. Flour would have to be manufactured from the proteins of each allergen to prepare precisely measured, minute doses, and it would have to meet the high purity standard for drugs.