Good news is on the horizon for parents of children with sever peanut allergies. The Addenbrook Hospital in Cambridge, England has already run a small, but successful, program to desensitize allergic children. Now they’re attempting to duplicate their results on a larger scale. “Every time people with a peanut allergy eat something, they’re frightened that it might kill them.” Dr. Andy Clark, who lead the Addenbrooke’s Hospital program says in a press release. “Our motivation was to find a treatment that would chance that and give them the confidence to eat what they like. It’s about quality of life.”
The new, larger study will exactly replicate the earlier program, which fed peanut allergic children daily doses of peanut flour. Starting with minuscule doses, tolerances were built up gradually over six months. By the end of the original study, subjects could tolerate the equivalent of five peanuts. Not a cure, certainly, but a huge step forward for a growing population of people so allergic to peanuts that they can’t even eat food prepared in factories where peanuts are present.
One of Clark’s success stories is nine year old Michael Frost – a severely allergic patient who has found the treatment life altering.
His mother, Kate Frost, says in the press release that: “It’s very hard to describe how much of a difference it’s made – not just in Michael’s life, but for all of use. A peanut allergy affects the whole family. You can’t go out to a restaurant. If your child goes to a birthday party, he takes a packed lunch.”
Michael is going to celebrate his tenth birthday in a Chinese restaurant, a place he wouldn’t have been able to step foot in before the treatment because of the frequent use of peanut oil.
It’s still unclear if the results are permanent, but so far, if Clark’s patients maintain their five peanut a day intake, they seem to maintain enough tolerance to live fairly normal lives.
