March 2013 – At the 2013 AAAAI allergists’ conference in San Antonio, there was a lot of talk – and some clear disappointment – after researchers investigating oral immunotherapy in milk-allergic patients reported that, for a majority, desensitization wasn’t holding up.
In fact, three to five years after completing an OIT study, Johns Hopkins University researchers said that many participants were more reactive to cow’s milk than they had been early in the course of treatment.
The team presented results from a follow-up study involving 32 children from two clinical trials in which they were fed tiny, then increasingly larger amounts of milk. These patients completed the milk oral immunotherapy, then underwent an oral challenge test for tolerance and were sent home with individualized instructions for daily milk consumption.
It turned out that 38 percent of the test subjects (12 children) who were thought to be desensitized were having frequent symptoms from milk three to five years after the trial had ended, while 22 percent had occasional symptoms. Only 25 percent of the participants were able to consume milk without symptoms. (The other 16 percent had ceased having milk.)
In terms of the type of reactions being experienced, 31 percent reported systemic symptoms (characterized as more than an itchy mouth or stomach ache) and 19 percent had symptoms serious enough to require an epinephrine auto-injector.
At a news conference at the AAAAI meeting, Dr. Robert Wood, director of pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins, did not mince words: “Some of the more dramatic failures had looked like absolute successes in the study. They were tolerating huge amounts of milk; they were about as close to ‘cured’ as we could imagine,” he said.
The study shows that 22 percent of the children had returned to either milk avoidance or minimal consumption of it. “The main thing that I’ve come to believe is that they were not as protected as we believed in that they self-restricted [consumption] because they didn’t like the side effects the milk was putting them through,” said Wood.
So have the researchers lost hope? Not at all. It appears more a case of figuring out where the research goes from here for some patients who lose newfound allergy protection easily.
“Learning something that’s disappointing is why it’s called research,” Wood noted about the study. As he told Allergic Living in an interview: “To go from where we were 10 years ago, which was to say that ‘we probably can’t give food to a highly allergic patient safely at all,’ to say now that some patients are having extremely good outcomes, this leaves us with encouragement that the long-term potential is very real.”
Dr. Wesley Burks, one of the leaders on OIT research from the University of North Carolina, summed it up well when he said: “There are a lot of encouraging results, but there’s also a lot of work to be done. This isn’t really ready for treatment – we’re not there yet.”
There are some intriguing bigger questions on where research will head to get “there”. Allergic Living examined these issues in a 2013 special report on food allergy treatment research.
Read more news from the 2013 AAAAI meeting here.
See Also: Parents Exposing Kids to Their Allergens
