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Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

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Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#51

Post by rahimnathwani »

marcod wrote: post #33
eskibars wrote: post #9

Our son is very allergic to peanuts and less so to cashew, and sesame. We went through oral immunotherapy and it's been absolutely life changing. He used to need an epi pen in case of chance encounter, but now he eats 2 whole peanut m&ms every day to keep his dosage up. It's been difficult finding an allergist in Germany that's willing to accept this and move forward Obviously everyone's mileage will vary, but I'm ha…

Sorry for being nosy, but did you do oral immunotherapy with or without professional support?

I AM NOT A DOCTOR OR OTHER HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL

I looked into oral immunotherapy for tree nut allergies. There's a paper from 2022: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/all.15212

They did it in a few stages:

1. First three days: test the child with increasing amounts of cashew protein, until the child has a reaction. Use the amount ingested for that reaction, to determine the single highest tolerated dose (SHTD = the maximal amount of cashew protein each patient could tolerate).

2. Next 24 days: the child ingests the SHTD daily.

3. After that: every month, the dose was increased (I think at an in-person visit), and taken at home for the next 30 days.

For #1, I looked at the amounts of protein they gave the child. Table S2 (in one of the supporting documents) shows how much they gave on days 1, 2 and 3. Of course they stopped increasing once the child had a reaction. If you convert the amounts of protein into equivalent numbers of whole cashews, then you get:

- day 1: start with 1/1800th of a small cashew, increasing up to a fifth of a small cashew.

- day 2: 1/5th small cashew, up to 2 small cashews

- day 3: 2 small cashews, up to 22 small cashews

22 small cashews is about equivalent to what they want to achieve by the end of the therapy, i.e. if you don't have a reaction after eating that many, you won't have a reaction to a greater quantity.

It seems a bit hard to DIY it, because:

- The first three days requires very small amounts of cashew protein. At home we don't have either (i) isolated cashew protein, or (ii) tools to measure such small amounts (starting with 0.1mg cashew protein, or 0.5mg cashew).

- For the first three days, we'd need to be very vigilant to watch out for a reaction. I don't know whether, in a supervised setting, they'd observe or measure other factors than just an apparent reaction, to make sure the procedure is safe.

I AM NOT A DOCTOR OR OTHER HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#52

Post by LegitShady »

type_enthusiast wrote: post #42
LegitShady wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamba_(snack)#Peanut_allergy You can click on the footnotes for sources.

Thanks! That thread leads to LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut allergy) which is a study that seems to have done a pretty good job of demonstrating that peanut exposure is in fact prophylactic against later allergy (as measured by a skin test). The data is pretty thorough: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1414850 Notably, > No deaths occurred in the study. so it's not a "naive analysis" of the kind that I…

Ya I get it - I was just pointing you to sources. It made some waves back in the day to the point where its become sort of an allergy meme but it was a real study.

apparently there was a follow up study called LEAP-ON where some of the subjects who had eaten bamba in the LEAP study were then asked to abstain from peanuts from age 5 to 6 and their tolerance to peanuts was then tested, and the results showed that infant peanut exposure reduced allergy levels even if they abstained later (you don't have to keep eating them, at least not within the time envelopes of the study).

Also another study that measured the different peanut allergens in bamba and compared it to peanut flour that concluded allergen levels were lower and more uniform in bamba making it useful for this purpose.

truthfully I don't need an excuse to eat bamba. If you like peanut butter its basically peanut cheatos (without the cheese) and is amazing, even though its super processed and definitely not healthy to eat compared to real food.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#53

Post by ein0p »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #6
darth_avocado wrote: post #3

I always think about the low incidence of peanut allergies in developing countries and wonder if the mother's diet during pregnancy has an effect on allergies in children? Has this been researched? Because instead of introducing peanuts and eggs to babies, introducing it to mothers is almost a no brainer.

It most likely has to do with how bored our immune systems are. We evolved to be constantly dirty, and we live in an extremely clean society. When your immune system has a lot to fight, it doesn't worry to much about dumb shit like pollen and peanuts.

This checks out. After moving to a state with a lot of greenery I developed a rather severe allergy to grass and pollen. Literally the entire face would get swollen and stuffy for several months in any given year. Not life threatening, thankfully, but very unpleasant. It went away within a year after I started mowing my own lawn and working in the garden without gloves.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#54

Post by ahstilde »

Immunotherapy works. I run a company (YC w21) that wants to eliminate allergies forever. It's ancient medicine to manage symptoms with antihistamines when we can remove the root cause completely.

Right now, we fix cat, dog, pet, pollen, and dust allergies. In a few years, we'll be doing nuts.

Our launch HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26227807

company: https://www.wyndly.com/

book a visit with a doc: https://www.wyndly.com/products/allergy-doctor-consult-onlin...

Or just start with an allergy test: https://www.wyndly.com/products/at-home-allergy-test

US Only right now. If you can help us expand into your country, contact me at aakash@wyndly.com

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#56

Post by colechristensen »

kristianp wrote: post #15
colechristensen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean vs. dirty isn't even the right way to think about it. We used to be immersed in an environment full of life, and now we live in mostly sterile environments free of life except for maybe some of the first wave colonizer specialist microorganisms. You are filled and covered with life that isn't from your own genes, and that microbiome is now mostly disconnected from the biosphere. I get some weird skin issues som…

Just curious, is it the ocean, or a fresh water body that helps?

A small Minnesota lake, just walking on the beach and taking a little dip.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#57

Post by gobins »

eskibars wrote: post #9

Our son is very allergic to peanuts and less so to cashew, and sesame. We went through oral immunotherapy and it's been absolutely life changing. He used to need an epi pen in case of chance encounter, but now he eats 2 whole peanut m&ms every day to keep his dosage up. It's been difficult finding an allergist in Germany that's willing to accept this and move forward Obviously everyone's mileage will vary, but I'm ha…

Wow that is really good to hear. I am on immunotherapy for a different type of allergy and can't stop talking about its effectiveness. It has been life changing.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#58

Post by curiousgal »

soperj wrote: post #20
praseodym wrote: post #2

In The Netherlands it is recommended to introduce peanut and egg to babies between 4 and 6 months, to reduce the chances of food allergy. More information (in Dutch): https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/nl/service/vraag-en-antwoord/...

Australia changed their recommendations to match this years ago, and the incidence of allergy didn't change measurably.

lol did they measure whether people were following the recommendations?

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#59

Post by femto »

timtyrrell wrote: post #31
darth_avocado wrote: post #3

I always think about the low incidence of peanut allergies in developing countries and wonder if the mother's diet during pregnancy has an effect on allergies in children? Has this been researched? Because instead of introducing peanuts and eggs to babies, introducing it to mothers is almost a no brainer.

I am the parent of twins. Their mother ate multitudes of peanut M&M's and similar items when pregnant. One twin has zero peanut allergies, the other one has deadly allergies and we are at the ER at least once a year from food contamination.

On the assumption that such allergies have a genetic component, presumably the twins aren't identical?

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#60

Post by bb123 »

It is not well known but this also works for adults too. I’m 28 and recently completed oral immunotherapy therapy for my extremely severe peanut allergy. I used to go anaphylactic from single milligram exposure and now I’m eating multiple peanuts a day. As an adult you have to go slower and be more careful but absolutely can be done and is life changing.
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