Team:Linkoping Sweden/Science2Go/06 15 0

A cure for peanut allergy?

2015-06-15

As of today, there is no cure for peanut allergy but an article in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology gives hope. They’ve tested something called sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT), which involves putting the allergen under the tongue for a while and then swallowing and they’ve had some promising results; of the 20 test subjects 14 responded to the treatment. These 14 went from a median successfully consumed dose of 3.5 mg to 496 mg in 44 weeks, which is a 14 071% increase in tolerance for peanuts!
Although this is great news, we have to remember that this study was done on a mere 40 people (the reason it says 20 above is that 20 of the 40 was used as a placebo control group) whereof none had any history of life-threatening reactions to peanuts (they were of course clinically diagnosed with peanut allergy, just not in the extreme form some have) so it might be a little early for celebration, but we might see a successful treatment for peanut allergy in the near future and that, at least, makes us happy!

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Reference

Burks, A, Wood, R, Jones, S, Sicherer, S, Fleischer, D, Scurlock, A, Vickery, B, Liu, A, Henning, A, Lindblad, R, Dawson, P, Plaut, M, & Sampson, H 2015, 'Food, drug, insect sting allergy, and anaphylaxis: Sublingual immunotherapy for peanut allergy: Long-term follow-up of a randomized multicenter trial', The Journal Of Allergy And Clinical Immunology, 135, pp. 1240-1248.e3, ScienceDirect, EBSCOhost, viewed 6 June 2015