Children's severe food allergies fade after one doc's new treatment

Note this should only be done under a qualified doctor's care.

by Lisa Flam
Mar. 14, 2013

An alarming one in every 13 kids in America has a food allergy, meaning the slightest contact with certain foods can be life-threatening, but there's new hope for kids with allergies thanks to a radical new treatment. NBC's Kristen Dahlgren reports.

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The Northern California couple found a doctor working on a treatment called oral immunotherapy, which would be used to try to knock out most of Tessa’s food allergies at once, by desensitizing her to those foods. In just four months last year, the experimental regimen, administered as part of a clinical trial, had worked.

Tessa, under the care of Dr. Kari Nadeau, a pediatric allergy and immunology specialist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., had become the world’s first person to be desensitized to more than one allergen at the same time, according to The New York Times Magazine, which featured the breakthrough in a March 10 cover story.

The magazine described Tessa’s treatment, which involved taking a powerful drug that suppresses allergic reactions and consuming a daily dose of small amounts of the foods she was allergic to. Her parents monitored her for two hours each night, and the doses were gradually increased in the hospital.

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“This treatment is really amazing,” Thernstrom said on TODAY. “Dr. Nadeau doesn't use the word ‘cure’ because she's a scientist and she's very careful.

“They use the word ‘desensitizing’ the child and having them ‘tolerate’ the food,” Thernstrom said. “But the fact is, from a parent point of view, it is a cure. Your child is eating the food and as long as your child eats the food every day, they're done with their allergies.”

There are, however, required daily maintenance doses so that patients do not regain the allergy, the magazine notes. Nadeau told the magazine that sensitivity can return if someone is off the maintenance doses for three days.

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[See the the link above information on enrolling in similar trials]