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"It has been demonstrated that patients who have food allergies have significant impairment in their quality of life," Factor told Infectious Diseases in Children. "What we have begun to do with our specific treatment is to desensitize children — as well as some adolescents and young adults — by oral desensitization to peanut, and measure the changes in the quality of life they experience from the outset until they reach their maintenance dose."
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Parents' surveyed assessment of children's quality of life demonstrated clinically significant improvement in 7/8 (87.5%) questions in the domain of food-related anxiety, 8/13 (61.5%) in emotional impact and 8/9 (88.9%) in social and dietary limitations.
"What we have observed is a significantly improved quality of life in terms of parent's perception of the children's experiences, adolescents and the children themselves," Factor said. "The data is quite robust, and of course, it is very rewarding to see families less anxious and less concerned about peanut allergy from the process of desensitization."
Quote from: Macabre on March 04, 2012, 03:05:07 PM
Any reason not to do this in the thread already created? I do think it needs a different subject line.
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Robert A. Wood, MD, director of Allergy & Immunology at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, presented new study results that indicated children with severe milk allergy who received a longer schedule of sublingual immunotherapy and then moved to oral immunotherapy had less respiratory reactions, along with less frequent use of certain medications.
"While the overall result of the study, which was recently published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, found that oral was far more effective than sublingual immunotherapy, it was also clear that oral was associated with more significant allergic reactions to the treatment," Wood, who is the senior study author, said in a press release.
The difference between sublingual and oral immunotherapy is that the allergen is held under the tongue with sublingual, where the allergen is simply swallowed with oral immunotherapy.
Previous research by Wood and colleagues compared sublingual therapy (allergen is held under the tongue) with oral immunotherapy (allergen is swallowed) after a short period of increasing sublingual doses. In the current study, the same researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke University tested patients to determine if a longer period on sublingual and then oral immunotherapy would improve the safety of the treatment.
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Yiqun Hui, MD, PhD, from the division of allergy and clinical immunology at The Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and colleagues conducted the study to determine the impact of a positive (failed) oral food challenge (OFC) on serum IgE levels.
"With a child fails an OFC, there is always a question about the encounter of the allergy during the OFC and whether that will have any impact on later recovery from food allergy," Hui told Infectious Diseases in Children. "At this moment, we do not have that kind of data."
The researchers found that food specific IgE levels were transiently elevated in the year following a positive OFC, but fell toward baseline afterwards.