A first-of-its-kind clinical trial tested whether slowly introducing small amounts of boiled peanuts into children’s diets could treat allergies. After a year of treatment, her 80% of children in the trial could safely tolerate peanuts, but researchers say the treatment is still experimental.
In recent years, oral immunotherapy treatment for peanut allergy has become increasingly accepted as an effective tool to help desensitize children. Very small and controlled doses of peanut protein are introduced slowly to help gradually develop tolerance. Side effects are still common with gradually increasing peanut doses in children.
For several years, it has been suggested that boiling peanuts reduces their allergenicity. A larger study was therefore designed to enroll 70 children with peanut allergy aged 6 to 18 years.
The year-long trial spanned three phases. The first phase he ran for 12 weeks, slowly introducing small amounts of peanuts boiled for 12 hours. Beginning with 62.5 milligrams of boiled peanut powder, by the end of the 12 weeks, participants were eating up to four boiled peanuts per day.
The next stage started with peanut powder that had been simmered for just two hours. At the end of 20 weeks, the cohort found that she was eating about 10 whole peanuts a day. His final 20-week phase transitioned to roasted peanuts, again starting with powder, aiming to get participants to eat up to six whole roasted his peanuts twice a day.
At the end of the 52-week trial, 80% of the cohort met their goal of safely eating nearly 12 roasted peanuts per day.
The new treatment was associated with moderate risk. Approximately 60% of the cohort reported experiencing some adverse allergic reaction during the course of the study. However, most of these effects were classified as mild and required only mild antihistamine or corticosteroid treatment.
The researchers noted that three participants (4%) experienced serious adverse reactions to treatment requiring treatment with epinephrine. However, the rate of serious allergic reactions to this immunotherapy remained lower than the 14% reported in previous peanut powder trials.
The new study’s first author, Luke Grzeskowiak, said the results were encouraging, indicating that boiled peanuts could be a potentially safe way to introduce children with allergies to peanuts. But he also stresses that this kind of treatment doesn’t work for everyone and shouldn’t be deployed at home by parents trying to desensitize their children to peanuts. .
“It is very important that people do not embark on immunotherapy without an appropriate level of oversight,” Grzeskowiak told The Guardian. “At the moment, it’s part of an experimental study.”
Researchers are now conducting another trial comparing a boiled peanut immunotherapy protocol to the more common peanut flour protocol. I hope it will clarify whether it is a viable strategy.
A new study was published in a journal clinical and experimental allergies.
Source: Flinders University
