Peanut allergy cured in majority of children in immunotherapy trial – The Guardian

Hope for children with Type 1 peanut allergies:

A small clinical trial conducted at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute has led to two-thirds of children treated with an experimental immunotherapy treatment being cured of their allergy. Importantly, this desensitization to peanuts persisted for up to four years after treatment. [The Guardian]

The article goes on to say that Prof. Mimi Tang developed a new kind of treatment combining “a probiotic with peanut oral immunotherapy”. This was designed as a way to “reprogram the immune system’s response to peanuts”.

All of this was very interesting to my wife and I as our oldest has a Type 1 peanut allergy. What’s more, we’ve long suspected that her allergy developed when she was on a trial of antibiotics, and we gave her some peanut butter. Prior to that, she’d had peanut butter with no allergic reaction. However, during this instance, we gave her the peanut butter and shortly after she developed a mild anaphylactic response. We wondered if her immune system was hyper-sensitized by the antibiotics, and it started attacking the peanut butter.