Dealing with a food allergy can be a terrible ordeal

Those of you who know people unlucky enough to suffer from them, also know that food allergies can be downright frightening. The individual living with an allergy to a given food has to live in an almost constant state of vigilance, especially if they're allergic response is severe in nature. For many people, the response to certain foods can be so severe, and so sudden, that it becomes a matter of life or death.

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Food allergies stem from a fluke of the immune system

One of the main reasons humanity has thrived on planet Earth is our immune systems. At any given moment we are absolutely immersed in foreign bacteria. The cells of your body are outnumbered by foreign bacteria by a factor of 10 to 1. In fact, according to the NIH, every human being is 1 to 3% non-human bacteria by weight.

After millions of years of evolution, much of the bacteria in and on your body is actually good for you. In fact, human beings would not last long without the melange of bacteria suffused into their bodies, which we now call the "microbiome".

However, there are many bacteria and viruses which are not so helpful. These dangerous invaders would quickly overcome humanity and kill us all - but for the adaptive qualities of the human immune system, which keeps harmful invaders at bay while allowing safe/helpful visitors to thrive.

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A case of mistaken identity

Food allergies are the result of our immune system misidentifying a particular food as a dangerous invader. How this happens is not entirely understood. Food allergies are more common among young children but they can also develop later in life. This late life development can have a clear cause, like the bizarre meat allergy people can get went bitten by a lone star tick., or no apparent cause at all.

The symptoms of a food allergy can run the gamut, from mild hives or itching, all the way to anaphylaxis - a dangerous physical state wherein your immune system goes into overdrive and, in the worst scenarios, your body begins to shut down or your throat to close. Peanuts are, generally speaking, one of the most likely food allergies to cause a deadly response, and although people can treat the symptoms with the quick use of an Epi-Pen or anti-histamine, there is no consistent or effective treatment for the underlying allergy... until, perhaps, now.

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Tricking the immune system into doing the right thing.

New research published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, which is available to view for free with a free Lancet online registration, investigated the long term effects of a fairly new combination treatment of oral immunotherapy with probiotics.

The idea behind the treatment is ingenious. The new method uses oral immunotherapy - or eating larger and larger amount of peanut in this case - with a very specific oral probiotic taken at the same time.

By choosing a bacteria in the probiotic which itself instigates a strong immunological response in the human body, and then eating that bacteria at the same time as the peanut, the goal of the treatment, in effect, is to trick the immune system into learning a new immunological response to peanuts.

(The precise details involve what's called a tolerogenic treatment, which attempts to utilize your body's dendritic cells to create a tolerance to the thing you're allergic to. As usual, I encourage you to read the paper, and do further research if you want to learn the ins and outs of this kind of treatment. For instance, its application as a potential treatment for Type 1 diabetes)

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Long Term Results

Oral Immunotherapy and Probiotic combinations have proven short term efficacy for some patients. But this new study wanted to know whether that efficacy lasted in the long term. So they went and found 48 people who had received this sort of treatment 4 years earlier and tested them for long term efficacy. Half of those people had received the treatment, while the other half had been placebos.

The results are impressive!

Of the individuals who actually received treatment, 16 of 24 were still eating peanuts regularly after four years! Comparatively, only 1 person from the placebo group could safely eat peanuts, while the rest still experienced an allergic reaction.

This is really big news, especially for those individuals who have to deal with food allergies in their day to day lives. Not only is there evidence that this newer form of treatment works - but it appears to work, for some people, for several years, at least. This has gigantic potential for those with food allergies, and could means the future for allergic people may be bright indeed.

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Information Source:

Long-term clinical and immunological effects of probiotic and peanut oral immunotherapy after treatment cessation: 4-year follow-up of a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial Hsiao, Kuang-ChihBurks, Wesley et al. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health , Volume 0 , Issue 0 ,

Other Sources linked to directly in article as appropriate.

Picture Source:
[1]By Jack Dykinga, USDA ARS [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons