Skin Patch Reduces Life Threatening Allergy to Peanuts

Possible life changing solution to peanut allergies?

The holy grail for life-threatening food allergies is desensitization, where the body ‘learns’ to tolerate whichever foreign substance it is reacting to. As a parent of a food-allergic child, making progress towards this goal has deep personal significance to me.

One of the most promising means to do this involves exposing the body to minute levels of the allergen; not enough to provoke any response, but enough to train the immune system to accept it. Studies that have investigated this in the past, by providing tiny amounts of peanut for peanut-allergic children to eat (termed ‘oral immunotherapy’), have been hopeful. But the approach is not considered ready for widespread adoption not least because the inherent risks are very real and one child did die in one study.

However, a newly-released study used an alternative to consuming the food. It used a wearable skin patch that delivered very small doses of peanut protein, just 50-250 micrograms, through the skin. At the end of the 1-year trial, half of patients using the 250 microgram dose, tolerated 10 times the peanut dose that they tolerated when they started the trial. No serious adverse reactions occurred.

While this is not yet FDA-approved, this is hugely promising news to the allergy community and may herald the way for the first actual treatment for food-allergic individuals.

Tags: peanut allergies skin patch peanuts

Author: Romilly Hodges, MS CNS

https://www.drkarafitzgerald.com/

Romilly Hodges, CNS CKNS CDN IFMCP mBANT CNHC, is a clinical nutritionist and Programs Director for Dr. Kara Fitzgerald. Romilly has written peer-reviewed publications, book contributions and many online articles. She is the author of the book Immune Resilience; The Breakthrough Plan to Protect Your Body and Fight Disease published in 2022 by Avery, a division of Penguin Random House. She has contributed to professional training courses and supervised practice programs for functional medicine and nutrition professionals. Romilly has also worked in clinical research, including designing the study diet for the first-of-its-kind epigenetic diet study run through the National University of Natural Medicine, as well as follow-up clinical research. She currently serves on the Board of the Accreditation Council for Nutrition Professional Education. We have both the opportunity and responsibility to change the trajectory of chronic disease through targeted, personalized nutrition, lifestyle and environmental interventions.

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Skin Patch Reduces Life Threatening Allergy to Peanuts

Possible life changing solution to peanut allergies?

Author: Romilly Hodges, MS CNS

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