Oral Immunotherapy to Treat Milk Allergies

Filed in archive Allergy: Research and Development , Food Allergies on November 23, 2008

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Lise Gagne

If you have allergies- be it food, latex, pet dander, metal, or other environmental allergies- your best course of action is to avoid the offending substance(s). There have been reports of people who were only moderately allergic to certain substances like peanuts, suddenly become anaphylactic after the nth exposure, suggesting that repeated exposure may have increased the person's sensitivity levels over time.

In contrast, there is a growing number of controlled clinical studies indication that repeated exposure to an allergen may desensitize an individual, thus reducing the immune reaction over time. Peanut oral immunotherapy has been shown to dampen a patient's allergic reaction to peanuts, or conversely, to increase an individual's tolerance for peanuts. And just recently, another study involving 19 children between the ages of six and 17 has demonstrated that exposure to increasing dosage of milk over a period of four months increased the tolerance levels of the children to milk. After the testing period, those that received steadily increasing doses of milk powder could already tolerate up to about 5140 mg of milk before a reaction resulted, compared to the control group which still reacted at the baseline dosage of 40 mg.

This certainly sounds to be a viable method to reduce and possibly treat dairy allergies. Bear in mind, however, that these results are based on small scale trials, under carefully controlled conditions. The milk immunotherapy study is reporting a tolerance to about 5 grams of milk at the end of the testing period. Five grams! Who knows if we'll ever see that stretched that to a glass a day?