Allergy and Immunology

• Exposure therapy for infants and toddlers leaves 4 out of 5 desensitized, study finds.
• Primary endpoint of sustained unresponsiveness to peanuts achieved in significantly more children in treatment groups.
• Earlier implementation of peanut protein exposure therapy yields superior results.
• At 2 treatment doses, exposure therapy was effective in rapidly suppressing allergic immune responses and achieving safe dietary reintroduction of peanuts.
• Study adds to collection of studies showing that exposure is treatment of many childhood allergies.

• Study found beneficial effects of early farm life on sensitization, asthma, rhinitis, and bronchial hyper-responsiveness.
• Researchers examined adults more than 10,000 adults from 14 countries.
• Children raised on farms were 54% less likely to develop asthma or hay fever and 57 percent less likely to have nasal allergies than children raised in cities.
• Children raised on farms were also 50% less likely to develop asthma than children raised in cities.
• Female children raised on farms in all of the 14 countries studied had superior lung function as adults than did women who grew up in cities.

• The global disease burden attributable to allergy and anaphylaxis continues to increase.
• This burden translates into significant personal costs to patients and families, and to overall healthcare costs.
• Early exposure to allergens may prevent the development of allergy later in life.
• For instance, the early introduction of peanuts into the diets of infants significantly decreased the frequency of the development of peanut allergy.

• Food allergies (FA) impair quality of life in both sufferers and family.
• Allergies are associated with increased healthcare costs for sufferers, family, healthcare systems.
• Effective treatments are available to clinicians but are found to be underused.
• Food manufacturers increasingly offer alternatives to highly allergenic foods.
• Promising newer approaches are available to clinicians, such as specific oral or epicutaneous immunotherapy and the use of monoclonal antibodies.
• A good deal of research shows that early exposure to minute amounts of potential allergens can entirely prevent the development of many types of allergies.
• Evaluation of FA severity and strategies for mitigation must be part of routine primary care.

• Homogeneous gut microbial population (dysbiosis) is associated with increased risk of allergies and other adverse conditions.
• Analysis based on data from the American Gut Project and fecal 16S rRNA sequence data.
• The researchers examined 122 non-redundant taxa (of 2379 total taxa) with a ≥0.1% mean abundance in calculating microbiota richness and diversity.
• Reduced fecal microbial diversity was associated with increased rates of allergy to foods (peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, other) and non-foods (drug, bee sting, dander, asthma, seasonal, eczema).
• Findings appear to provide further support to the hygiene hypothesis of allergy and autoimmunity.
• Dysbiosis might be targeted with bacteriotherapy to improve treatment or prevention of a wide variety of allergies.

• Human papillomavirus (HPV) causes approximately 1.6% of the more than 1.6 million cases of cancer diagnosed in the U.S. each year.
• HPV the most common sexually transmitted infection.
• A highly effective vaccine is available to protect against HPV infection.
• Only about 38% of eligible females and 14% of eligible males receive the vaccine.
• Higher rates of adherence to CDC vaccination guidelines could significantly reduce the rate of HPV-related cancers.

• Approximately 185 confirmed cases of measles attributable to 4 outbreaks in the U.S. in 2015
• Nearly 90% of cases occurred in unvaccinated or under vaccinated patients.
• Majority of cases were seen in California in attendees of Disneyland.
• Illinois, Nevada, and Washington saw outbreaks not linked to the Disneyland occurrences.
• Cases were recorded in 24 states and the District of Columbia.

The following is a list of recently published articles that are relevant to the topic of oral immunotherapy for allergies. This list is intended to accompany our article on this type of therapy for food allergies.

The articles have been selected by the MDalert.com editors based on the quality of the research, the importance of the finding, the number of people affected by it, and the cost of the therapy studied.

• The prevalence of peanut allergy at 5 years of age was 13.7% in the avoidance group and 1.9% in the consumption group (P<0.001).
• Exposure is proving to be more effective than avoidance in preventing skin and food allergies.
• During the period of peanut avoidance in young children–2000 to 2010–the prevalence of peanut allergy more than quadrupled.
• Do these findings explain the rural-urban enigma of allergy?