Note about study discussed below – please do not try oral
immunotherapy (OIT) or OIT with probiotic supplements on your own! This is an
experimental food allergy treatment to be performed under strict medical
supervision.
In the latest edition of medical headline hyperbole, many of
us learned last week that “Fatal
peanut allergies could be cured by probiotic bacteria, say Australian doctors”
and “This
Breakthrough Treatment Helped Over 80 Percent of Allergic Kids Tolerate Peanuts.”
Sigh… We all want a cure, and many scientists/clinicians are
working tirelessly toward that goal (including the research group that
performed the original
peer-reviewed study(1)),
but please, oh please media, stop overselling the scientific findings! I’m quite
literally tired of having to explain the same thing over and over again!
Unfortunately, there is a reason why one of my blog labels is now “Misleading
Science Headlines.” I don’t necessarily want to go into the details of why this
is so detrimental to both the science and food allergy communities, but rather
I’d like to take the rest of this two part post to explain why the headlines
got it wrong, what can actually be
concluded from the study, and where the science may go from here. Lianne
Mandelbaum, who founded No Nut Traveler,
authored an excellent
piece at the Huff Post Blog explaining why
misleading headlines are such a problem when it comes to food allergies. I
encourage you to take a read.
Brief summary of the study:
Mimi Tang, et al., from the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne,
Australia tested if the combination of oral immunotherapy (OIT) and a probiotic
supplement could lead to “sustained unresponsiveness” in peanut allergic
children compared to a placebo group (peanut
allergic children who did not receive peanut OIT or probiotic). They found that
after stopping treatment (ranging from 2-5 weeks) over 80% of children who
received OIT + probiotic maintained a “sustained unresponsiveness” to peanut
compared to only 3.6% of the placebo group (1).
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| Study design: Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled |
