Egg Therapy May Help Allergic Kids
Exposing children with egg allergies to egg in a carefully
controlled setting can dramatically reduce and even eliminate potentially
life-threatening allergic reactions for some children, new federally funded
research shows.
About 4% of children in the U.S. have food allergies,
according to the CDC.
At present, the only good way to avoid reactions to
allergic foods is by strictly avoiding them.
But an approach known as oral immunotherapy, which seeks
to slowly desensitize the body to the allergic food, is showing promise in
early trials.
In a new study appearing in the New England Journal of
Medicine, children who were allergic to eggs were given small but increasing
doses of egg white powder for 10 months, followed by several years of
maintenance dosing.
More than a quarter of the children who were treated with
the egg white powder lost their allergic reactions altogether after two years.
"These children went from having serious allergic
reactions after a single bite of an egg-containing cookie to consuming eggs
with minimal or no symptoms," says Robert Wood, MD, who directs the
allergy and immunology department at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Children's
Center.
Although results from the oral immunotherapy trials are
encouraging, Wood warns that the treatment is still highly experimental.
"We are still very much in the research phase,"
he tells WebMD. "There are still many things to be worked out before this
treatment is ready for use in the practice setting."
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