Could There Be A Treatment for Allergies?

Could There Be A Treatment For Kids With Allergies?

For nine years, the greatest challenge Kim Yates Grosso faced each day was keeping her daughter Tessa safe. Tessa was so severely allergic to milk, wheat, eggs, nuts, shellfish and assorted other foods that as a toddler she went into anaphylactic shock when milk fell on her skin. Kim never left her with a baby sitter. She slept with her each night. And when she needed to work, she found a job she could do primarily from home in the evenings. She successfully lobbied the Menlo Park, Calif., school district to provide Tessa with a full-time aide (in accordance with the Americans With Disabilities Act) to shadow her at all times. She made all of Tessa’s food from scratch, including safe treats to bring to birthday parties, when she could persuade her daughter to attend them at all. Tessa never spent the night at a friend’s house — she didn’t feel comfortable sleeping in an unsafe environment.

Desensitization is a straightforward idea; it’s the same principle, according to legend, that King Mithridates VI used to cultivate immunity to poison (an occupational hazard of royalty in the ancient world). The therapy has been used successfully for environmental allergies for decades, by giving patients small injections of pollen or cat dander or other allergens, but it was considered too dangerous to try with food allergies until recently. A study testing various allergens was pioneered in Europe in the 1980s, and in the past five years, ongoing studies at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and other centers have shown that children can be safely desensitized to a single allergen, peanut, and, in separate trials, to milk and egg.

Could patients be desensitized to more than one allergen at a time? No one had ever tried it, but more than a third of children with food allergies are allergic to more than one food. If it was safe to give patients x milligrams of one allergen, would it be safe to give them one-fifth of x milligrams of five different allergens, as long as the total dose remained the same? That would assume that allergens function in a linear, additive fashion — rather than a multiplicative one; it was also possible that they could interact with one another to produce a more severe reaction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/can-a-radical-new-treatment-save-children-with-severe-allergies.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=health

I found this article interesting because it speaks to so many people all over the world. Since like 1 in 13 kids have food allergies, being able to treat allergies is something that would affect a lot of people. This article talks about how giving kids with allergies small doses of allergens over a time span could greatly decrease their allergic reaction. The question the doctors faced in this article was whether it was possible to get the same affects from this treatment if they gave smaller doses of man allergens to a child who was allergic to many things. The doctors had never tried giving multiple doses of allergens to a patient before, so they had to do a lot of tests. They would administer the allergens by giving the patient one fifth of a dose of an allergen. They would have to do this five times with five different allergens. The idea would be that the patient would get the same amount of allergen, but with more than one allergy being treated.

The doctors hoped it would be successful, so that the test would be able to be administered to kids with multiple allergies. Although there would be a problem with the amount of time it would take to give the patient the amount of doses they needed. Since doctors hadn’t tried this treatment before. Also they weren’t even sure if the treatment would work. It was tested on many different kids and was mostly successful. A boy named Kieran who was allergic to many things including: peanuts, almonds, cashew, hazelnut and egg. After nine months of being treated with the allergen doses he was three hundred times less allergic then he was at the start of the trial. It seems that the treatment could be successful for some kids and proves to help. Although it will still be at least a year before Kieran can eat a whole serving, he can already eat foods with traces of nuts in them.

This treatment definitely affects us in California today, because of al the people who have allergies or know people with allergies. This treatment is certainly a step forward in medical treatments and will be improved over time, until perhaps allergies aren’t a problem. Obviously this treatment isn’t a guarantee, and is expensive, and might not have as successful affects on every child, it is still quite an achievement in medicine. As was shown in the article, life for those with multiple allergies or just one is hard, not only for the allergic person, but their friends and family. This treatment could be a great help not only for those living in California, but all over the world. Hopefully in the future the treatment will be helpful for everyone and will be available to those who need it.