Could This Be the Cure for Peanut Allergies?

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Does your child have a food allergy? If not, consider yourself lucky. An estimated 15 million people in the United States have food allergies. Roughly two children in every classroom, in fact, are afflicted, according to the Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE) organization. And the numbers have been growing. Between 1997 and 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that food allergies among children increased a staggering 50 percent.

Considering that reactions can be life threatening, a small study from researchers in Australia promising a possible cure is big news for parents.

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After doctors at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute gave 30-odd peanut-allergic kids a dose of peanut protein plus a probiotic in an increasing amount daily over an 18-month period, they found that 80 percent of the children could consume peanuts without any reaction, published on January 13 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

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"Many of the children and families believe it has changed their lives, they’re very happy, they feel relieved,” head researcher Mimi Tang, of Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital’s Department of Allergy and Immunology tells London’s Guardian. “These findings provide the first vital step towards developing a cure for peanut allergies and possibly other food allergies.”

But don’t run to the store for yogurt (a probiotic) just yet. The method isn’t one parents can, or should, mimic yet at home. The probiotic in the study, for one, Lactobacillus rhamnosus was administered in a dose equivalent to eating 20 kg – or about 44 pounds – of yogurt each day. Also, Tang “strongly advises against” parents experimenting on their own. “In our trial some children did experience allergic reactions, sometimes serious reactions,” she says. “For the moment this treatment can only be taken under the supervision of doctors as part of a clinical trial.”

James R. Baker, Jr., MD, CEO and chief medical officer of FARE tells Yahoo Parenting while “We are supportive of all efforts to find a cure for food allergy…there is no standard and approved therapy that can prevent reactions.”

He adds, “We look forward to further evaluation of these preliminary results involving probiotics and oral immunotherapy [but] it is critically important to evaluate the long-term safety and efficacy of such studies.”

Still, Tang tells Yahoo Parenting the future is promising. “It is the highest rate of response that has been reported for oral immunotherapy so far,” she says of her research. “So we are optimistic that this will be an effective therapy once it has been validated and refined.”

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