A man who suffered from a peanut allergy collapsed and died from severe anaphylactic shock less than an hour after receiving treatment for his allergy from an alternative medicine practitioner.

 

Dublin Coroner’s Court yesterday heard that Thomas Schatten (43), of Marina Village, Malahide, Co Dublin, collapsed and died in the living room of his home on the evening of May 18, 2005.

He had earlier been treated for the peanut allergy by kinesiologist Dr Brett Stevens, who told the inquest that Mr Schatten ate a small bit of peanut during his appointment, to which he had no reaction.

The allergy elimination technique used by Dr Stevens, who is also a chiropractor, is called NAET and involves “muscle testing”. The inquest heard that Mr Schatten, an editor and writer, had received the treatment on four previous occasions for his peanut allergy and suffered no ill effects.

Following the treatment, Mr Schatten, who had experienced two anaphylactic reactions in the past, went to the bathroom and Dr Stevens, upon hearing coughing coming from the toilet, asked Mr Schatten if he was all right. Mr Schatten, who suffered from asthma, said he had a bit of a cough and that his chest was tight and indicated he wanted to go home to get his medication for asthma.

Reaction

He left the clinic at 5.20pm. Dr Stevens told the court he didn’t think Mr Schatten was having an anaphylactic reaction. He said he was aware that he had suffered a reaction to peanuts when he was young and avoided them prior to beginning the treatment.

About 15 minutes later, Dr Stevens rang Mr Schatten to make sure he was all right. Mr Schatten could only say the words “breathing” and “ambulance”.

After arranging for an ambulance to be called, Dr Stevens made his way to Mr Schatten’s apartment. He found him lying on the ground with laboured breathing. He suffered a cardiac arrest on the way to Beaumont Hospital and was pronounced dead at 6.55pm. A post mortem found he had died of an acute hypersensitivity reaction or anaphylactic reaction to peanut.

Supervision

Professor of histopathology at the Royal College of Surgeons and at Beaumont Hospital, Mary Leader, told the inquest that in (allopathic) medicine such desensitisation would not be carried out without strict supervision in a hospital where drugs, IV access, oxygen and a doctor were immediately available and she said no person should be tested for nut allergy without these. “If a patient has an acute anaphylactic reaction like this they are immediately treated with drugs to stop the reaction,” she said.

She said the coughing and tightening of chest Mr Schatten experienced are symptoms associated with an allergic response. The court heard there was an approximate 35-minute time lapse between the ambulance being called and arriving, due to a shortage of ambulances.

There were no suspicious circumstances, Garda Shay McGrath said.

He said he believed the death was accidental and Dr Stevens was attempting to alleviate the allergy using the methods he used. A file went to the DPP in relation to the death.

Coroner Brian Farrell recorded a verdict of death by misadventure and called for the re-evaluation of the NAET allergy elimination technique in relation to peanut allergies.

“Nut allergy is a particular situation. All the clinicians I spoke to said assessment of nut allergy needs to be dealt with guardedly,” he said. “This is the second inquest in the coroner’s court in the last three months where a person has died of peanut allergy. It emphasises the seriousness of peanut allergy.”

via Man died an hour after being treated for peanut allergy – Courts, National News – Independent.ie.

Nurse practitioner and manager of the Bunning Food Allergy Program at Children’s Memorial Hospital, Christine Szychlinski, is recruiting parents for an extensive, ongoing study to determine the causes of food allergies. She explains some food allergy basics:

Q:  How are food allergies different from food sensitization and desensitization?

A:  A food allergy really happens with every ingestion. You cannot eat cheese one day and not tolerate milk the next and think it’s a cow’s milk allergy. Sensitization to food is a positive allergy test without a history of an allergic reaction. At one point in time your body recognized that as an allergen, but not to the point where it would make you ill. Sensitization is a process where people can eat the food in prescribed doses and can tolerate it, but they must eat it every day. However, if you stop eating the food, your allergy will re-emerge. That is not what we want overall for families. What we want for the children is tolerance. Tolerance means a person can eat the food in any amount at any time.

Q:  How prevalent are food allergies?

A:  Six percent of young children have food allergies and 4 percent of the adult population. The prevalence of food allergies is growing worldwide. There are approximately 150 deaths per year and 90 percent of those are preventable.

Cow’s milk is the most common allergy among young children. Egg white is another common allergy that has become a bigger issue for children since we now recommend that children get an influenza vaccine grown in egg at six months of age. Peanut allergies are also common, and unlike cow’s milk and egg white, are unlikely to be outgrown. A child’s diagnosis is allergen dependent.

Q:  How should I talk to my doctor about allergy symptoms?

A:  It’s very important to describe symptoms simply. I’ve been accused more than once of thinking my patients are unsophisticated because I want them to use general terms. I want you to tell me what you saw because a lot times people will ascribe things to allergies that it’s my job to determine if it is allergies.

Q:  How do you diagnosis a food allergy?

A:  The most important thing is the history. I want to know what surrounded these episodes, exactly what happened. Tell your doctor what you saw, how soon the symptoms started and all the foods that are ingested. When we ask you 1,000 questions, we’re not challenging you and we’re not thinking you don’t know what you’re talking about. We really are trying to find out what caused a child’s reaction.

Another important part for your doctor to know is: What was done, and did it work? We need to know these things bit by bit, and in your own words. After the complete history is done, testing can be used to confirm or refute the history.

Q:  How can allergies be treated or prevented?

A:  Strict avoidance, reading labels and avoiding cross contamination of foods processed or packaged in facilities where a food you’re allergic to is also processed can help prevent food allergies. Also wearing medical id jewelry, having an epinephrine prescription and having an emergency plan are helpful. You can make an emergency plan with the help of www.foodallergy.org .

via Nurse practitioner answers some frequently asked food-allergy questions .

A recent study conducted at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York suggests that a Chinese botanical drug can help patients manage their food allergies. This new drug may help many allergic patients in the western society and could also assist in curing other conditions such as asthma.

Food allergies have been turning into an increasingly common ailment in the western world. In the US alone, about 5% of the adults and 10% of the children suffer from one allergy or another. Allergies can be very dangerous, as in some cases the allergic individual may have a severe reaction to the allergen and in extreme cases can even go into anaphalactic shock and die. The traditional treatment for food allergies is simple avoidance. In case of failure in avoidance, a liquid antihistamine can be used to stop the allergic reaction and in some cases, epinephrine can be injected.

Dr. Xiu-Min Li from the Mount Sinai hospital recently realized that there are significantly fewer cases of allergies in China than in the United States. She believes that traditional Chinese medicine that is based on plants’ medical properties can be used to cure allergies. Together with a group of researchers she found a food allergy herbal formula (FAHF-2) which produced long term protection against peanut-induced anaphylaxis in mice. Treatment using FAHF-2 protected peanut allergic mice from anaphylaxis for more than 36 weeks after the mice stopped receiving the drug.

“Food allergy is a serious and sometimes fatal condition for which there is no cure,” said Dr. Li. “Approximately 80% of fatal or near-fatal anaphylaxis cases are due to peanut allergy in this country. There is an urgent need for effective therapies to prevent and treat those who suffer from food allergies and FAHF-2 could prove to be a major advancement in this field.”

The new formula may help not only individuals allergic to peanuts but also sufferers from a variety of other ailments. These include allergies to fish, shellfish, and tree nuts as well as severe or persistent asthma. Normally, asthma is treated by inhaled steroids which may cause serious side effects. If this type of steroid is used for long periods of time it may impair growth and cause immune-suppression. Parents of asthmatic children are showing an increasing interest in alternative treatments, with 60% of the children receiving some form of it in the past year.

The FAHF-2 drug has recently entered the human trials stage and is currently being tested at Mount Sinai to evaluate its safety and early efficacy on multiple food allergies including peanut, tree nut, fish, and shellfish.

TFOT has previously brought you several stories of disease cures found in plant sources. One such story described an experiment conducted at the Northwestern University which showed that an antioxidant present in soybeans was able to reduce metastases. More recently we’ve brought you the purple tomatoes that may reduce the chances for cancer developed by researchers from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, U.K.

You can read more on the Chinese botanical drug on the Mount Sinai website.

via Chinese Botanical Drug to Cure Peanut Allergies.

I’ll continue to try to locate the results but please exercise caution and ask many questions before jumping into this kind of study. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. The doctors and researchers are using very measured doses and processes to do this study. This could be dangerous if not fatal to attempt this on your own.

CONCORD, N.H. — One mom says she’d be first in line for a promising treatment that exposes children with peanut allergies to tiny amounts of peanut flour. Another remains fearful, with the painful image of her son’s face blown up beyond recognition still fresh in her mind.

While some parents of children with life-threatening peanut allergies see a glimmer of hope in a recent study suggesting a possible cure, others remain dubious that it will ever change their children’s lives.

“It’s like when we were growing up 20 years ago and we saw the flip phones on ‘Star Trek’ – that was going to be the wave of the future, but we thought that would never happen,” said Eva Stilkey of Raymond, N.H. “It’s great, but those of us who live with the disappointment and the reality of it, you kind of protect yourself. We really do hope it happens someday, but we don’t want to have false hope.”

Earlier this week, scientists announced the findings of a small study that involved giving a handful of highly allergic children tiny amounts of peanut flour daily for more than two years. Gradually, the children became less sensitive, and so far, five show no remaining sign of the allergy.

Larger studies are beginning to see if the treatment works for more people and how long it lasts. But it was big news for the many people who are allergic to peanuts.

Stilkey’s son, Nicholas, who turns five on Friday, was 2 1/2 when a single bite of peanut butter pie sparked a severe reaction.

“We had him spit it out, and when he did, when he lifted his head back up. I couldn’t even recognize him. His face was blown up to a point where there was no separation between his nose or his lips. He was stuffing his hands frantically down his throat trying to breathe,” she said.

Stilkey considers the study participants heroes, but she’s in no hurry to follow in their footsteps.

“I am full of complete admiration for the parents and those children who put themselves through that because I know as a mother, I would be absolutely fearful to try to put Nick through that, just because I’ve seen what happened to him,” she said.

Tamara Leibowitz, who runs a support group for parents of children with food allergies in Portsmouth, N.H., said it would be a leap of faith to subject her son to small doses of what essentially has been considered poison, but “I think we’d jump at the chance.”

“My son would be terrified at the beginning, but he’s been paying attention, too, even at nine years old, and he’s really encouraged by what he sees,” she said, describing her own reaction as “cautiously optimistic.”

In Orange County, Calif., Louise Larsen said she, too, would seek out the treatment if it becomes available.

“Would I put my child through that? Sure, if I sat right next to her, and we went very slowly and it was in a very controlled setting,” said Larsen, whose 12-year-old daughter is allergic to peanuts. But she said she would never be completely convinced that the allergy was gone.

“Even if they did conclude she no longer had any allergy, as her mom, I’m going to send an EpiPen with her until she goes to college,” she said, describing the portable injections used to treat anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction marked by swelling of the throat or tongue, hives and breathing trouble.

Another California mom, Lori Fletcher, would be just as eager to try the treatment on her six-year-old son, though she and other parents worry that publicity over the breakthrough would create more misconceptions about food allergies. She doesn’t want people who have heard the news to assume that it means her son now can have “just a little bit” of food containing peanuts. “We still need to be avoiding it,” she said.

But she also found the news inspiring, and plans to use it to promote an upcoming fundraising walk.

“I hope people take from it that if we do raise money, we can get a treatment fairly soon,” said Fletcher of Danville, Calif.

In the meantime, parents said they will remain vigilant, obsessively checking each food label and ensuring their children’s safety at home and school.

“Every time you think you finally have come to a point where you can sit back a little and trust the school has everything in place, you get the phone call that someone has brought this in by mistake,” said Stilkey.

Lori Pelletier-Baker of Concord, N.H., hasn’t faced that situation yet because her four-year-old daughter isn’t in school, but kindergarten is just around the corner.

“It is a constant weight that I think everybody, including Kaleigh, carries on their shoulders,” she said. This week’s breakthrough doesn’t lessen that weight, she said.

“There’s that piece of me that thinks, ‘Wow, that’s so amazing!’ But the reality is that it may take a long time to reach us,” she said. “I’m not going to give up hope, but I know that things aren’t going to change any time soon.”

Copyright © 2009 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

via The Canadian Press: Mixed reaction from parents on peanut allergy advance; many remain dubious.

Remember: “This is not something to be done at home”

By Kathleen Doheny

HealthDay Reporter

SUNDAY, March 15 (HealthDay News) — Exposing children with peanut allergies to a carefully administered daily oral dose of peanuts helped them build tolerance to the point where some of them appear to have lost their allergies, a new study found.

However, the researchers, from Duke University Medical Center and Arkansas Children’s Hospital, cautioned that the approach is still experimental and should not be tried by parents on their own.

“This is not something to be done at home,” said Dr. Wesley Burks, chief of the division of pediatric allergy and immunology at Duke and a co-author of the research. “It truly is an investigational study.”

But the children in the study did build long-term tolerance, with the researchers documenting key immunologic changes reflecting a lack of allergic response.

Burks and his colleagues were expected to present their findings Sunday at the American Academy of Asthma, Allergy & Immunology meeting, in Washington, D.C.

About four million American have allergies to foods, and tree nut allergies, including peanut allergies, are the most common. For the highly allergic, exposure to even a trace amount of peanuts can provoke a life-threatening reaction. Nearly half of the 150 deaths attributed to food allergies each year are caused by peanut allergies, according to background information in the study.

For the study, which began five years ago, Burks and his colleagues gave children with a history of peanut allergy gradually larger daily doses of peanut protein, while other allergic children were given a placebo. The starting doses were very small, as little as 1/1000th of a peanut. The doses increased until the children ate the equivalent of up to 15 peanuts a day about 10 months later, and then they stayed on the daily therapy while they were monitored.

Nine of the 33 children participating in the study have been on maintenance therapy for more than 2.5 years, and four of them were able to discontinue the treatment and eat peanuts, the researchers said.

When the researchers tracked immunologic changes — specifically levels of an antibody called immunoglobulin E, which the body makes in response to allergens — they found the levels had declined to nearly nothing at the end of the trial.

“I think what has been shown in this [research] is that the threshold [at which allergic reactions begin] really can change with treatment,” Burks said.

Changing the threshold is valuable, he said, because it could mean that if a child with a peanut allergy accidentally ate something with peanut in it, he may have no reaction. “If you do that alone, you give the family comfort,” he said.

Still to be answered is whether doctors can “make the disease go away,” Burks said, adding that his research will continue.

The concept of exposing an allergic person to small amounts of the allergen isn’t new, of course, said Dr. Scott Sicherer, associate professor of pediatrics and chief of the division of pediatric allergy and immunology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

That’s the idea behind allergy shots.

“I think this [Duke-Arkansas] is very promising, the results,” added Sicherer, who’s also chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Section on Allergy and Immunology.

Funding for the study was provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, the Food Allergy Project, the Gerber Foundation and the Robins Family Foundation.

via HealthDay.

Hopes of a normal life for nut allergy victim Charlotte

Published Date: 13 March 2009

A Sheffield girl is taking part in a groundbreaking medical trial that could cure her of a nut allergy that currently threatens her life.

Charlotte Kirkland, aged eight, is so allergic to peanuts and other nuts that she has to carry medication in case she falls ill. She can’t have ice-cream, sweets or cakes unless her parents, Wendy and David from Stocksbridge, have carefully checked all the ingredients on the packet and are confident they contain no traces of nuts or nut oils.

Now it hoped that she may eventually be able to lead a normal life as a result of trials at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge where doctors are using a new technique to built up children’s tolerance. By the end of the programme they should be able to eat the equivalent of five peanuts a day safely.
 

Charlotte, who goes to the hospital every fortnight, started by eating a speck of peanut flour and has gradually built up her resistance. The Deepcar St John’s Primary pupil is carefully monitored to ensure her body does not go into a severe reaction and a ‘crash team’ of doctors is on standby. She could eat her first peanut within a few weeks.

Charlotte’s allergy was detected when she was 18 months old and she licked the chocolate off a Brazil nut and her lips swelled to twice their normal size. She was found to be allergic to all nuts but severely reactive to peanuts.

Dad David said: “We are so pleased Charlotte’s on the trial as life is very restrictive. She can’t go to parties without her own food and she gets upset when she can’t have ice cream or sweets.”

Peanut allergies affect one in 50 young people in the UK and commonly cause breathing problems. At their most serious they can lead to a potentially life-threatening anaphylactic shock.

Experts says the treatment will remain effective as long a child on the trial continues to take their daily dose of peanut flour or peanuts, to help them retain the tolerance they’ve built up.

via Hopes of a normal life for nut allergy victim Charlotte – Sheffield Telegraph .

Herbal Remedy Could Halt Peanut Allergy

Tests in mice were successful, and human trials are under way

Posted February 13, 2009

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, Feb. 13 (HealthDay News) — A new herbal formula based in ancient Chinese medicine may be able to control allergic reactions to peanuts and other foods, researchers from New York City’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine report.

Food allergies are potentially life-threatening for children and adults. Food allergies among children have increased 18 percent since 1997, and in 2007, some 3 million U.S. children had food allergies, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Currently, there is no treatment for the allergies, so avoidance is the only protection.

“We can reverse the peanut allergic reaction,” said lead researcher Dr. Xiu-Min Li, director of the Center for Chinese Herbal Therapy for Allergy and Asthma at Mount Sinai.

In addition, protection from allergic reactions to peanuts persisted for almost nine months after treatment was stopped, Li said. “The herbal formula can stop peanut allergy and produce a prolonged protection,” she said. “This formula may be effective for human peanut allergy.”

The report was published in the February online edition of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

For the study, Li’s team tested their new herbal remedy, called Food Allergy Herbal Formula (FAHF-2), on mice allergic to peanuts. They found that the formula protected mice from allergic reactions from peanuts.

In fact, FAHF-2 protected the animals from anaphylaxis for more than 36 weeks after treatment was stopped. This is one-quarter of the mouse life span, Li noted.

Li’s team has also shown the formula protects mice against other food allergies including tree nut, fish and shellfish.

Based on these findings, FAHF-2 has been given investigational new drug approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; a human trial started last year.

The trial is testing the safety and effectiveness of the remedy for a variety of food allergies including peanut, tree nut, fish and shellfish, Li said. “The results of the trial have shown that FAHF-2 is safe and well-tolerated,” she noted.

In addition to FAHF-2, Li’s team has developed an herbal formula to treat asthma. That formula is also being tested in human trials, she said.

Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said that no matter where it comes from, a cure for peanut allergy would be an important breakthrough.

“This paper suggests that traditional Chinese medicine may offer promising therapy for peanut allergy,” Katz said. “This is less surprising than it may seem.”

First, it is probable that the use of herbs as medical therapy over a span of many centuries would distinguish the helpful from the useless and harmful by a process of trial-and-error, Katz said. Second, most drugs are derived from plants. “So, the actual differences between pharmacotherapy and herbal therapy are differences of degree, not kind,” he said.

When traditional Chinese medicine works, doctors want to know the science of how it works, Katz said. “But for the sake of their patients, conventional practitioners should look past terminology that may make them wince to see the promise of new and potentially effective treatments.”

Allergic reactions to food can range from mild hives to vomiting to difficulty breathing to anaphylaxis, the most severe reaction. Anaphylaxis causes muscles to contract, blood vessels to dilate and fluid to leak from the bloodstream into the tissues. This can result in narrowing of the upper or lower airways, low blood pressure, shock or a combination of these symptoms, and also can lead to a loss of consciousness and even death.

More information

For more information on food allergies, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

via Herbal Remedy Could Halt Peanut Allergy – US News and World Report.

Doctors in Britain are closer to finding a cure for severe nut allergies, according to a study published Friday.

A research team at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge exposed children gradually to tiny amounts of peanuts over six months to build up their tolerance.

It is the first time such a desensitization program has been used to treat a food allergy.

Four children — who risked fatal anaphylactic shock from contact with traces of peanut — took part in the study published in Allergy.

The children were initially given a dose of five milligrams but by the end were able to tolerate 880 milligrams — equal to five peanuts.

“We’ve shown it works. We’ve shown it can be done safely. Now we’re at the stage where we need a larger trial and perhaps a control group, so that we can show it has a large effect,” said Dr. Andy Clark, the study’s lead researcher.

The research provides hope for the one in 50 young people in Britain with a nut allergy, he added.

“Every time people with a peanut allergy eat something, they’re frightened that it might kill them. Our motivation was to find a treatment that would change that and give them the confidence to eat what they like,” Clark told the Guardian.

Thirteen-year-old Carl Morris took part in the study.

“I got pretty scared when I was eating things with traces of nuts, but now I can just freely explore different foods that may have killed me before,” he said.

Kate Frost is the mother of a nine-year-old boy who participated in the study.

“It’s very hard to describe how much of a difference it’s made, not just in Michael’s life, but for all of us,” Frost told the BBC.

“A peanut allergy affects the whole family. You can’t go out to a restaurant. If your child goes to a birthday party, he takes a packed lunch.”

It’s estimated that more than 150,000 Canadians suffer from peanut allergies. About two per cent of people can have an anaphylactic reaction to an allergen, and peanut allergies account for 50 to 100 deaths in the United States every year.

via Tiny study suggests peanut allergy can be overcome.