800,000 children in the United States have a high threshold peanut allergy. Recent research by Mount Sinai’s department of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at Mount Sinai has shown that personalized food allergy treatment could be possible: That more than half of people with peanut allergy can tolerate half a peanut or more. To test if the response to treatment was durable, children in the peanut-ingestion group who could tolerate nine grams of protein during the feeding test went on to consume at least two tablespoons of peanut butter weekly for 16 weeks and then avoided peanuts entirely for eight weeks. Twenty-six of the 30 treated children who participated in a final feeding test after the eight-week abstinence period continued to tolerate nine grams of peanut protein, indicating that they had achieved sustained unresponsiveness to peanuts.
In addition to expanding the work to more foods and validation studies of their approach, the Mount Sinai study team aims to determine a better way of identifying individuals with higher thresholds, because the best way to do so currently requires a feeding test that is bound to cause an allergic reaction.