I have the good fortune of not having any food allergies, but I can only imagine what it must be like for people who can’t eat something used as often as a peanut. Growing up without being able to have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches would’ve, well, let’s be honest, it would’ve stunk. That’s why it’s great to read this CNN report about an advance in fighting peanut allergies that has one scientist calling the potential “very exciting.”
The new research, courtesy of Cambridge University Hospitals in the UK, shows that immunotherapy may temper allergic reactions. Immunotherapy involves giving someone with a peanut allergy a small amount of peanut in the beginning and slowly increasing the amount over time. As the article mentions, it’s the same idea that’s used in allergy shots. And, according to the results of the study, after one year, 15 of the 23 children who were tested could handle 32 peanuts at a time, after starting off with just 1 mg at the beginning.
Dr. Anna Nowak-Wegrzyn, an associate professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and the excited scientist mentioned above, was quoted as saying, “I’m confident that within the next three to five years we will have a treatment that we can offer to our patients, which is not necessarily a cure.”
As mentioned in the article, according to the Mayo Clinic, “about 4 percent of adults and 6 to 8 percent of children under 3″ suffer from food allergies so, cure or not, a potential treatment is still news that gives hope to millions of people.
Photo courtesy of EuroMagic via Flickr.