Oral Immunotherapy for Food Allergic Patients

The new year is a good time to report on the accomplishments of the Center for Allergy at Assaf HaRofeh in 2016, and lay out some of our goals for the year ahead. As of this writing, there are 1045 patients who have participated in our oral immunotherapy (OIT) programs for food allergy. The two most commonly treated allergies at our center are milk (70% of patients) and peanut (18% of patients) allergies. While egg allergy is currently the third most treated allergy (6%), we are seeing a rapid enrollment of sesame-allergic patients since beginning sesame OIT two years ago. The Center for Allergy at Assaf HaRofeh remains the only center providing sesame OIT in Israel, and at the current pace of enrollment, we expect that sesame as well as treenuts will surpass egg as a treated allergy at our center by the end of 2017. We began a treenut OIT program in 2016, and thus far, eight patients have successfully completed treatment (6 to walnut, and 2 to hazelnut). Most of the enrolled treenut allergic patients have multiple treenut allergies, providing the opporutnity to study whether successful treatment of one treenut allergy might lessen the allergy to others.  All told, 86% of patients in our various OIT programs attain complete (67%) or partial (19%) desensitization to their respective foods after treatment. The word has gotten out about the success of our OIT programs; with the high demand and limited resources, the patient waiting list currently extends into 2018. We are currently looking into options for facility expansion that would allow us to provide food allergy OIT for those that seek it, and enhance the experience of our patients in the clinic.

Our experience in OIT has afforded us the opportunity to research treatment modalities, with the aim to improve them. In this regard, we recently published an article (link attached) describing symptoms such as severe abdominal discomfort in some patients patients undergoing OIT. We observed that these symptoms were associated with a rise in blood eosinophil counts, and could be lessened if the pace of OIT was reduced. Going forward, this research may provide direction for better and more effective OIT treatment.

Finally, several members of our staff will be attending the American Association of Allergy Asthma and Immunology meeting, this March in Atlanta. We have a poster session as well as an oral presentation detailing our program in treenut allergy diagnosis and treatment. We look forward to providing more details in our next update.

As always, we thank you for your continued support for our project. 

Links:

• Article on symptoms related to OIT