Have Nut Allergies Been Cured?

[n2doc]

By Kiera Butler| Mon May. 16, 2011 2:30 AM PDT


Growing up in the '80s and '90s, I was the only kid I knew who was allergic to nuts. I remember explaining to a skeptical teacher why I couldn't eat the walnut brownies she'd brought for us one day. "But how do you know you won't like them if you won't even try?" she asked. Times have changed. You'd be hard pressed to find a gradeschool teacher now who wasn't well versed in EpiPens and anaphylactic shock; some school cafeterias are now nut-free zones. Indeed, nut allergies are on the rise. Last May, researchers at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine found that the rate of childhood peanut allergy had more than tripled in recent years, up from .4 percent in 1997 to 1.4 percent in 2008.

No one is quite sure why allergies are becoming more common. One theory called the hygiene hypothesis speculates that the environment in developed countries is actually too clean: Since children no longer encounter the full array of germs and parasites they once did, their immune systems instead busy themselves reacting to pollens, molds, and certain proteins in foods. (In developing countries allergy rates are vanishingly tiny.) The allergy onslaught has also been linked to climate change; immunologists have long connected the rise in hay fever cases to global warming, and in 2008 an Ausrtralian researcher suggested (PDF) that climbing temperatures could be making certain foods more allergenic as well.

When I was diagnosed with nut allergies as a baby, my parents were told there wasn't much they could do about it, short of keeping me away from the offending foods and carrying an epinephrine shot in case I accidentally ate something nutty and developed an anaphylactic reaction. But in the past few years, pioneering immunologists have been experimenting with a new therapy for nut-allergic kids. Called oral immunotherapy or desensitization, it exposes patients to gradually increasing doses of nuts, with the aim of increasing their tolerance. The results so far have been promising. In the first study of the technique at Duke University, five out of seven participants were able to tolerate eating the equivalent of 13 peanuts by the end of the roughly two-year trial. Subsequent studies of other nuts, eggs, and milk, have shown similarly positive outcomes.

So will allergic kids soon be able to shed their EpiPens and MedicAlert bracelets? And will I get to order pad thai without all my friends chorusing to the poor waitress, "No nuts please!"?

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/05/nut-allergies-oral-immunotherapy-desensitization

[Indydem]

1. Alergy cases have increased because of developed society.

In agrarian society, if a child had an allergy to an everyday food, and developed a life-threatening reaction, they were going to die. They weren't going to pass on their allergy-prone genes to the next generation. Now we have substitutes, epipens, and allergy conscious menus. Those with allergies have kids with allergies and the pattern repeats.

[LiberalLoner]

2. I sure hope they are able to cure allergies. I can't imagine the worry parents must

feel every day when their child is deathly allergic to something like nuts that are found in many common foods.

I really do believe in densitization. I was allergic to cats, but I just love cats too much to live without them so I just decided I would live on benadryl. Well, I was allergic at first, yeah, and had to use that benadryl for the first month I guess, but then something happened, my body just got used to the cat dander I guess, and I was fine, didn't need the benadryl any more.

I am glad they are making progress against life-threatening allergies.

[frazzled]

3. Peanuts aren't nuts

They're legumes. And a peanut allergy is totally unrelated to nut (or "tree nut") allergies.

I developed a peanut allergy in my early 20s, out of the blue. (That was 40 years ago, before anyone had even heard of such a thing.) I tried to sensitize myself by trying a tiny bite of peanut once a year, just to check that I wasn't crazy and making it up. A half a peanut would send me into near-death state. I finally gave up after five or six years and just avoided them.

It's possible my allergy has disappeared over the decades as mysteriously as it developed. But I'm not going there. Even the smell of peanuts makes me ill. It's not a difficult food to avoid. Why tempt fate.

PS: I only mention the thing about peanuts not being nuts (like walnuts) because that giant error is in the first paragraph of the article you quote. It doesn't put much confidence in the rest of the article's scientific basis.

[HopeHoops]

5. We're growing peanuts again this year. They are beautiful plants.

The plant becomes a canopy-style bush and then puts down red tendrils into the soil. The peanuts develop underground at the end of these tendrils. We grow them in containers because it is a hell of a lot easier to harvest them that way than if you grow them in the ground. I think the confusion comes from the name and the fact that they are usually the main component of "mixed nuts" containers.

[HopeHoops]

4. Keep in mind that there are different "nut" allergies. Peanuts aren't even NUTS - they're legumes.

And cashews are a seed. Tree nut allergies can vary from mild to really nasty, but peanut allergies are often life threatening. My wife's school is a peanut-free zone because one of the kids would require an ambulance with any exposure. Tree nuts aren't a problem for the kid or anyone else in the school so they are allowed. I imagine cashews are as well, but they're a little on the expensive side. I hope they actually do solve the problem, but for now the answer is "no, it hasn't been cured."

[safeinOhio]

6. No longer keep an Epipen around.

Injectable Benadryl works great for me. Much cheaper, just have to get to it quicker. Epipens are no fun.

[damntexdem]

7. No, I'm still allergic to teabaggers and neocons.

;-)

And there are still many people with very severe allergies to the food stuffs called nuts, and to other non-nut-containing food stuffs (e.g., candy) processed on machines that also process foods with nuts in them.

[sbm]

8. re: Have Nut Allergies Been Cured?

Peanut/nut allergies are one of the more dangerous ones. I hope they can find a cause & cure for that, sooner rather than later. I have a few friends that suffer from that, and I've seen how severe it can be.