Doctors reverse children's egg allergy - by using eggs

Article by: MARILYNN MARCHIONE , A ssociated P ress
Updated: July 18, 2012 - 9:07 PM

It's no DIY therapy, but the method shows promise for future therapy and will be tested in a wider group.

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Doctors sought to train a child’s immune system to tolerate even small amounts of egg, one of the most ubiquitous foods.

Photo: Virginia Mayo, Associated Press

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First peanuts, now eggs. Doctors have reversed allergies in some children and teens by giving them tiny daily doses of problem foods, gradually training their immune systems to accept them.

In the best test of this yet, about a dozen kids were able to overcome allergies to eggs, one of the most ubiquitous foods, lurking in everything from pasta and veggie burgers to mayonnaise and even marshmallows and vaccines. Some of the same doctors used a similar approach on several kids with peanut allergies a few years ago.

Don't try this yourself, though. It takes special products, a year or more and close supervision because severe reactions remain a risk, said doctors involved in the study, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

"This experimental therapy can safely be done only by properly trained physicians," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

It didn't work for everyone. But the results "really do show there is promise for future treatment" and should be tested now in a wider group, said the study's leader, Dr. A. Wesley Burks, pediatrics chief at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

More than 2 percent of young children have egg allergies, suffering wheezing and tight throats or even life-threatening reactions if they eat any egg, Burks said. Many will outgrow this by age 4 or 5, and more will by the time they are teenagers, but 10 to 20 percent never do. The big worry is that these kids will eat eggs as an ingredient in a food they don't realize contains them, and have a severe reaction. Training a child's immune system to tolerate even small amounts of egg to prevent this was the goal of the study.

It enrolled 55 children ages 5 to 18. Forty were given tiny daily amounts of powdered egg white, the part that usually causes the allergy. The other 15 were given cornstarch -- a dummy treatment -- for comparison. The amounts were increased every two weeks until kids were eating about one third of an egg each day. They periodically went to their doctors to try eating eggs. They failed the test if a doctor could see any symptoms such as wheezing.

At about a year, none receiving the dummy treatment passed the egg challenge. Those on the egg white powder fared better. "At the end of the year, half of them passed. At the end of two years, 75 percent of them passed," Burks said.

Next, he tested to see if participants could maintain tolerance without the daily powder. Those who passed the second test stopped using the powder, avoided eggs for four to six weeks, then tried eating eggs again. Eleven of the 30 kids were able to do this with no problem.

It worked for Nicholas Redmond, 10, of Huntersville, N.C. Avoiding eggs has been "a huge problem," said his father, Chris Redmond. Now Nicholas has some egg nearly every day to maintain his tolerance, which his father finds terribly ironic. He said, "You spend 2 1/2 years avoiding eggs" and now have to make sure he gets some.

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55 children in study
40 given egg white; rest given dummy treatment
0 members in dummy group that passed egg test
20 members in group exposed to eggs that passed test one year later

30 in exposed group to pass two years later