It’s a nut-so miracle!
For two British men, peanuts used to be a death sentence. Now? They’re a morning snack.
Both suffered from lifelong peanut allergies that had sent them to the hospital before joining a nine-month study in the UK — where two-thirds of participants came out able to safely eat peanuts.
Chris Brookes-Smith, 28, was terrified of peanuts after some Indian takeout sent him to the hospital with hives that he likened to boiling water being poured over his body.
“I thought I was going to die,” he told the BBC.
This life-threatening allergy made activities that should have been enjoyable — like eating out with friends or traveling — fraught with peril. He even avoided visiting regions of the world where peanuts were likely to be in his food, like Southeast Asia.
That was until a clinical trial conducted by King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust changed his life.
“It’s a wonderful feeling,” he said. “I’m no longer afraid of dying.”
The trial utilized a method called oral immunotherapy, in which the body becomes desensitized over time with microscopic doses of the allergen. They started patients off with trace amounts of peanut and gradually increased the amount.
By the end of the nine-month study, 14 of the 21 patients could eat up to five peanuts a day without having a reaction.
Professor Stephen Till, who led the study, told the BBC that the treatment “has potential to have a real impact on patients’ lives. They’ve taken control, if you like, of their peanut allergy now.”
That certainly seems to be how Richard Lassiter, 44, feels.
“There was definitely a sense of nerves at first. You know, you have to get your mind around the idea of eating something you’ve tried to avoid your whole life,” Lassiter told Sky News.
“I obviously had a couple of [dangerous] incidents reasonably fresh in my mind.”
Now, eating four peanuts — under medical supervision — is just a normal part of his morning.
“The idea that I take four peanuts a day now after my breakfast is well-worn routine,” he said.
“I’m certainly much more confident and calm when I go out to dinner with my wife, or when we go traveling. I know that accidental exposure to peanuts isn’t going to cause a serious reaction like it has done in the past.”
Brookes-Smith is relieved, too, that peanuts will no longer send his body into “nuclear meltdown” — though he admitted that he actually hates the taste of them, despite now having to eat them every day to maintain his desensitization.
Till cautioned that while this is certainly “not something to do at home,” the treatment has the potential to benefit people with other types of allergies — though larger trials would need to be conducted first.
“The principle should be applicable to other food options, but what I would say is that different foods can behave differently in terms of the amounts that are required to cause reactions and how severe the reactions are,” he told Sky News.
“So to do it in other foods, you really do need to do trials for those specific foods individually.”
Oral immunotherapy has only been used to treat food allergies for the last two decades, though it’s predominantly been conducted on children, as adult allergies tend to be more stubborn.
In other words, this peanut breakthrough is nuts.
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