After years of frustration, allergists meeting in Washington proclaimed a small but significant victory against life-threatening peanut allergies.
Five children, long urged to avoid peanuts like the plague, today tote peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in their lunch boxes, blithely share candy with friends and accept snacks at other people's homes without quizzing their hosts on the treats' ingredients.
The children appear to have lost their allergies, said Dr. Wesley Burks, a Duke University pediatric allergist who presented the results of two clinical trials Sunday at a meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
The unpublished trials tested whether peanut-allergic patients could be helped to tolerate peanuts by consuming tiny but increasing doses of the food, which induces hives, itching or swelling and is responsible for about half of the 150 annual deaths associated with food allergies in the United States. The studies are the first in a series of promising efforts to push back this dangerous, and growing, allergy.
As many as 3 million Americans have an allergy to peanuts, and usually also to tree nuts such as almonds and walnuts. The percentage of U.S. children with a food allergy jumped 18% in the decade leading to 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and there has been a fourfold increase in children's hospitalizations for food allergies in recent years. Researchers have puzzled over the cause of this rapid rise; some have suggested that childrens' dwindling exposure to dirt, soil and animals has driven the increase.
Though the studies are small and preliminary, Burks said the group planned to enroll more children in the research, and he hoped that within two to three years, the first of several treatments for peanut allergies will be available to physicians.
"We're encouraged," said Robert Pacenza, executive director of the Food Allergy Initiative, a patient group active in promoting research and educating the public about the dangers of food allergies. Though only five children have so far had a seemingly complete reversal of their allergy, that's five that have never been seen before, he said.
In the studies, conducted by a joint team of researchers from Duke University Medical Center and the Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute, children started on the equivalent of 1/1,000th of a peanut and progressively worked their way up.
