A carefully administered daily dose of peanuts may help children with peanut allergies build long-term tolerance to the food, U.S. doctors reported on Sunday.
However, the doctors, from the Duke University Medical Center and Arkansas Children's Hospital, noted that the research is still ongoing and cautioned parents and professionals against trying it on their own.
"We have to wait for the studies to show the treatment is safe, and to see desensitization start to work," said Wesley Burks, chief of the division of pediatric allergy and immunology at Duke in a press release.
Burks and colleagues presented their findings at a meeting of the American Academy of Asthma and Immunology in Washington on Sunday.
The doctors gave 33 children in their research which began five years ago doses of peanuts that started as small as one-thousandth of a peanut and eventually increased to about 15 peanuts per day.
Nine of those children have been on maintenance therapy for more than 2.5 years and four were taken off the treatment and continued to eat peanuts, they said.
The doctors then examined a protein called immunoglobulin E (IgE) which the body makes in response to peanut allergens and found its levels in the children declined dramatically.
"Children in this study generally started with IgE levels greater than 25," Burks said. "At the end of the study, their peanut IgEs were less than 2 and have remained that way since we stopped the treatment."
"It appears these children have lost their allergies," said Burks. "This gives other parents and children hope that we'll soon have a safe, effective treatment that will halt allergies to certain foods."
About four million Americans suffered from food allergies, and nearly half of the 150 deaths attributed to food allergies each year are caused by peanut allergies.
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