Canada’s first nationwide food allergy survey shows that about 1.7 per cent of children under 18 have a probable peanut allergy, while another 1.59 per cent have a probable allergy to tree nuts, such as hazelnuts and walnuts.

This study was from 2008-2009 and was conducted over the phone to 10000 families. That’s a good sized sample and shows that a great many children are affected.

It’s also notable that there is a great difference between results in the US and Canada.

He says the rates are higher in Canada than in the U.S. — a 2002 American study found that 0.83 per cent of children have peanut allergies and 0.51 per cent are allergic to tree nuts.

Keep in mind the time between studies. It is possible for those results to have changed in 6 years.

Read the whole article here.

This article reviews a new study from Mcmaster University and Dalhousie University in Halifax where 30 children with peanut allergies are going through the ingestion immunotherapy process.

One notable difference in thsi study compared to the one done in the US is that they will be allowing in children with severe reactions. The study in the US worked only with children whose allergic reactions were mild.

Snippit

Encouraged by the positive results of British and American trials on oral immunotherapy and peanut allergies, Canada will soon begin its own research.

The study, being run by Hamilton’s McMaster University and Dalhousie University in Halifax, will focus on 30 children with peanut allergies. They will ingest small quantities of peanuts over an extended period of time.

The British and American trials have shown that gradual and steady exposure to the peanut allergen can reduce or, in some cases, eliminate reactions altogether.

Researchers aren’t calling it a cure, but it could be a big step in the right direction.

“Children in the U.S. and England have been given tiny amounts of peanuts and it appears to be working,” says Dr. Susan Waserman, an allergist at McMaster and one of the Canadian study organizers. “Right now, there’s no treatment beyond avoidance and the use of (epinephrine auto-injectors), so this is all good news.”

The project will be presented to an ethics board in the next few months, with the work beginning shortly thereafter.

Read the full article here.

Obese children and teens are 26 per cent more likely than kids of a normal weight to have some kind of allergy, especially a food allergy, U.S. researchers report.

But it is not yet clear if obesity actually causes allergies; only an “association” between obesity and allergies was found, said Dr. Darryl Zeldin, the senior author on the paper.

“While the results from this study are interesting, they do not prove that obesity causes allergies. More research is needed to further investigate this potential link,” Zeldin said.

Nevertheless, the authors suggest that controlling obesity in young people may be important for lowering rates of allergies.

The researchers, from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a part of the U.S. National Institutes for Health, analyzed data on 4,111 children aged 2 to 19 that included information about allergies and asthma.

They looked at a number of factors including body weight and BMI (body mass index), antibody levels to indoor, outdoor and food allergens, and responses to a questionnaire about diagnoses of hay fever, eczema, and allergies.

They found that antibodies for specific allergens were higher among children who were obese or overweight.

“The signal for allergies seemed to be coming mostly from food allergies. The rate of having a food allergy was 59 percent higher for obese children,” said Dr. Stephanie London, a researcher at NIEHS.

The study appears in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The study is the first to be published using new data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). NHANES is a large survey designed to assess the health and nutritional status of American adults and children.

An allergy/asthma component was added to the 2005-2006 NHANES study, making it the largest nationally representative dataset of allergy and asthma information ever assembled in the U.S.

“There is a wealth of knowledge we will be able to gain by analyzing these data that will be useful to allergy and asthma sufferers,” said Zeldin.

via CTV.ca | Obese children more likely to have food allergies.

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.

MONDAY, March 16 (HealthDay News) — A small number of food products with a “may contain” label actually do contain an allergen, while about 2 percent of foods products without such a claim also contain allergens, new research shows.

 

But the offending products more often came from smaller companies, noted the authors of a study that is scheduled to be presented Monday at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology’s annual meeting, in Washington, D.C.

“We didn’t do an exhaustive survey of every product out there, but one thing we did notice is that products that didn’t have this labeling but did have detectable proteins came primarily from smaller companies,” said study senior author Dr. Scott H. Sicherer, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. “So for what it’s worth, we could presume that small companies don’t have as much oversight.”

Still, Sicherer added, buying certain food products can be a game of roulette for people with allergies.

“If you’re a patient with a food allergy, it’s probably best to stick with the larger companies,” agreed Dr. David Resnick, director of allergy and immunology at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, New York Presbyterian Hospital, in New York City.

Food allergies, which affect about 2 percent of adults and 5 percent of infants and young children in the United States, can range from the merely irritating to the life-threatening.

“Not too many fatalities are reported with egg allergies, but with peanuts, that’s where fatalities are more likely to be reported,” Resnick stated. “If you’re buying food from a smaller company and have a serious allergy like a peanut allergy, you have to be really cautious.”

The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 (FALCPA) required new labels on packaged foods containing “major food allergens,” which were defined as milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts and soybeans, or any other ingredient that contains protein derived from one of these foods or food groups.

Among other things, the labels had to include plain-English descriptions of ingredients and possible allergens. For example, “milk” is used instead of “casein.”

But the issue of “may contain”-type labels was not addressed. Such warnings can include “may contain peanuts,” “processed on shared equipment,” or “manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts or milk.”

Consumers (and probably some experts) have been confused by this sort of labeling, which, said Sicherer, is not regulated.

Of supermarket-sourced, randomly selected food products that had such labeling, 5.3 percent had detectable levels of one of three allergens: egg, milk or peanut.

Among products tested that did not carry “may contain”-type labeling, 1.9 percent had detectable levels of one of the allergens.

In all, 399 products were tested.

Although the researchers did not specifically look at this, about half of the 19 products containing an allergen might prompt a reaction in sensitive people, Sicherer said.

The group also did not explore which food types or groups were more likely to contain allergens, but other researchers reporting at the same meeting found that dark chocolates were a leading offender.

A food industry spokesman said that current labeling is guided by the best available science.

“Our members are committed to ensuring that food allergic consumers have the information they need on the food label to make informed choices about whether or not a particular food item is appropriate for them to eat,” said Brian Kennedy, director of communications at the Washington, D.C.-based Grocery Manufacturers Association. “That is why we support the use of science-based criteria by food and beverage companies in determining whether or not a supplemental or ‘may contain’ allergen advisory on a food product label is necessary.”

via HealthDay.

They’re about four times as likely to be food allergic as the rest of the population, says Dr. Andrew Liu, a co-author of the study, which he says was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

“We know that children are more likely to have a food allergy,” says Liu, an associate professor at the National Jewish Medical Research Center in Denver. “And we know that people of black ethnicity tend to have a higher rate of food allergy.”

The survey was the first one in the U.S. in which researchers actually took blood samples and tested them for signs of potential food allergy, says Dr. Scott Sicherer, co-author of the study and professor of pediatrics at Mt. Sinai Medical Center. The study involved 8,203 participants who ranged in age from 1 to 85 and had a food sensitivity to egg, milk, peanut and shrimp. Blacks, males and children, especially black male children, were found to have higher levels of the immune responses associated with clinical food allergy, Liu explained.

“Further studies have to be done,” Sicherer says. “This group now has to be thought about a little bit extra by doctors.”

Researchers didn’t theorize about why black male children may have a higher rate of food allergy. Some experts feel that introducing a food too early in life sets up a child for food allergy. “But our understanding of early introduction is unclear,” Liu says. “There are other signs that early introduction could be protective. Clinical trials are underway now to try to determine whether introducing a food early can cause a food allergy.”

Liu says that the next step is exploring why black male children are so high-risk for food allergies. “We hope that this study raises awareness on some key issues, helps us identify the groups at risk, and then target groups for research and policy making.”

What causes food allergies in general isn’t clear, says Dr. Anatoly Belilovsky, a Brooklyn-based pediatrician and allergy expert.

“Some studies have shown that being on a farm has a protective effect against allergies,” he says. “We know that obese children tend to be more allergic.”

“There are many different theories,” says Dr. David Resnick, director of the Allergy Division at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. “It could be environmental, or genetic, or a combination. We know that African Americans have higher asthma rates. More research is needed before you can make any conclusions.”

About 2.5 percent of the population has a food allergy, and peanut and shrimp are the most common allergens, Liu says.

Food allergies aren’t necessarily a lifelong sentence. Many kids outgrow their allergies to wheat, soy and milk, Resnick says. A young child with a peanut allergy has a 20 percent chance that he will outgrow the allergy, but there’s only a 10 percent chance that he will outgrow a tree nut allergy, Resnick says.

via Black male children are four times more likely to have food allergies: study.

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.

Nearly four per cent of ACT kindergarten children have a peanut allergy and while the regions schools are well prepared to cope with this, some parents are taking inappropriate action when dealing with their childs allergy, according to a new study.

The research was a co-operative study by the Academic Unit of General Practice and Community Health at The Australian National Universitys Medical School and ACT Health. It surveyed 3851 children in the region to discover the prevalence of peanut and nut allergies, what management systems were in place in schools and how parents viewed and reacted to their childs allergy.

 

Professor Marjan Kljakovic of the ANU Medical School said the study – probably the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere – indicated that worries about the rate of peanut and nut allergy were well-founded.

“Our study shows that 3.8 per cent of five year olds in the ACT have a history of peanut allergy – thats a high number of children,” he said. “However, while theres a lot of hype about peanut allergy, its still relatively uncommon.” The study showed that 94 per cent of local schools were aware of their students allergies and 76 per cent had a management procedure in place for the school to act when the child had an allergic reaction. However, Professor Kljakovic said that some of the responses indicated that the public health messages that were getting through to schools were not making it through to the regions parents.

“The study showed two things of concern. The first is that action on food allergy was influenced by the level of worry the parent had about their childs allergy. In other words, the less worried parents were about food allergies, the less likely they were to observe their child having symptoms and to act on them.

“The second concern is that some parents reacted inappropriately following seeing their child having an allergic reaction to peanut. In such cases, it is not appropriate to watch and wait for the reaction to subside, induce vomiting in the child or apply calamine lotion to the skin, as some parents seemed to think.

“Parents should administer oral antihistamines as soon as they notice their child having an allergic response to peanuts, and the symptoms could include hives on the skin, swelling around the mouth, lips or eyes, abdominal pain or vomiting. If the child has a history of severe anaphylactic reaction to peanut, with further symptoms including collapse or wheezy breathing, then an adrenalin auto-injector should be administered. All children should be sent to their GP following an allergic reaction, who will most likely refer the child for specialist tests,” said Professor Kljakovic.

The study, The parent-reported prevalence and management of peanut and nut allergy in school children in the Australian Capital Territory, has been published in Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health. The full study is available from the ANU Media Office.

via Canberra Parents Lack Allergy Awareness: Study.

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 .