12-million Americans suffer from food allergies. More than three-million of them are allergic to peanuts. While there are drugs to treat an allergic reaction, there's nothing that can fix food allergies for good. Now, doctors are using peanuts themselves to treat allergies. The goal is to cure the potentially life-threatening condition.The new treatment mixes a tiny amount of peanut powder -- about one-thousandth of a peanut -- into a child's food. Gradually, they increase the dose over time.
"We see the first changes to the immune system happen about six months into treatment and then further changes happen beyond a couple years of the treatment," Wesley Burks, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics at Duke University Medical Center.
In the four-year study, 89-percent of the kids with severe peanut allergies could eat up to 15 peanuts. 12 percent had to drop out because they couldn't handle the treatment, but another 25 percent lost their peanut allergies altogether in another part of the study.
Doctor Burks says this was a medically-supervised study, and parents should not try the approach at home. Doctors at Duke University and Arkansas children's hospital are still enrolling kids in more peanut allergy studies. They believe there will be a treatment for peanut allergies in the next two or three years.
