This is very good research which will help lot of kids who are allergic to egg...
What is egg allergy?
Eggs are one of the most common allergy-causing foods in children. Egg allergy symptoms usually occur a few minutes to a few hours after eating eggs or foods containing eggs. Signs and symptoms range from mild to severe and can include skin rashes, hives, nasal inflammation, and vomiting or other digestive problems. Rarely, egg allergy can cause anaphylaxis — a life-threatening reaction.
Egg allergy can occur as early as infancy. Most children outgrow their egg allergy before adolescence. But in some cases, it continues into adulthood.
What are Symptoms of egg allergy?
Egg allergy reactions vary from person to person and usually occur soon after exposure to egg. Egg allergy symptoms can include:
Skin inflammation or hives — the most common egg allergy reaction
Allergic nasal inflammation (allergic rhinitis)
Digestive (gastrointestinal) symptoms, such as cramps, nausea and vomiting
Asthma signs and symptoms such as coughing, chest tightness or shortness of breath
What is Anaphylaxis?
A severe allergic reaction can lead to anaphylaxis, a life-threatening emergency that requires an immediate epinephrine (adrenaline) shot and a trip to the emergency room. Anaphylaxis signs and symptoms include:
Constriction of airways, including a swollen throat or a lump in your throat that makes it difficult to breathe
Abdominal pain and cramping
Rapid pulse
Shock, with a severe drop in blood pressure felt as dizziness, light-headedness or loss of consciousness
When to call a doctor?
See a doctor if you or your child has signs or symptoms of a food allergy shortly after eating eggs or a product that contains eggs. If possible, see the doctor when the allergic reaction is occurring. This may help in making a diagnosis.
If you or your child has signs and symptoms of anaphylaxis, seek immediate emergency treatment and use an auto injector if one has been prescribed.
What are the Causes?
All food allergies are caused by an immune system overreaction. The immune system mistakenly identifies certain egg proteins as harmful. When you or your child comes in contact with egg proteins, immune system cells (antibodies) recognize them and signal the immune system to release histamine and other chemicals that cause allergic signs and symptoms.
Both egg yolks and egg whites contain proteins that can cause allergies, but allergy to egg whites is most common. It's possible for breast-fed infants to have an allergic reaction to egg proteins in breast milk if the mother consumes eggs.
God news Research- Egg Allergy in Kids Overcome with Egg Therapy
New research from the US finds that egg therapy, eating small but gradually increasing daily doses of egg white powder, may help affected children overcome their allergy to eggs. However, the researchers urge people not try it at home because the conditions have to be carefully controlled by a trained doctor. In the small trial, 75% of 40 children who received a daily, gradually increasing dose of egg white powder, were symptom-free after nearly two years while they were on the treatment, and 27% of them remained symptom-free after another year with no treatment during which they ate as much egg and products containing egg as they wanted to. A paper on the research appears in the 19 July online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study is one of several government-funded trials of oral immunotherapy (OIT), where a person with the food allergy gradually takes increasing amounts of the allergenic food as a way to treat the allergy.
One of the sponsoring agencies is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. Their director, Anthony S. Fauci, told the press, While this relatively small study provides encouraging new information, it is important for the public to understand that this experimental therapy can safely be done only by properly trained physicians. The organization running the trials is called the Consortium of Food Allergy Research (CoFAR), which is supervised by the NIAID Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation. The director of this division is Daniel Rotrosen, who cautioned:, “Although these results indicate that OIT may help resolve certain food allergies, this type of therapy is still in its early experimental stages and more research is needed. We want to emphasize that food OIT and oral food challenges should not be tried at home because of the risk of severe allergic reactions," he warned.
Egg Allergy
Egg is one of the most common causes of food allergy. The cause is one or more proteins in the egg: these can be in the yolk or the white. Most people with egg allergy are allergic to the proteins in egg white.
The most commonly reported symptoms include eczema, hives (where the skin breaks out in raised, often itchy, red welts), asthma, allergic rhinitis (irritation and inflammation of the mucous membrane inside the nose), anaphylactic shock and digestive symptoms. Most children tend to outgrow egg allergy by their fifth birthday, but some people remain allergic for the rest of their lives. The current approach to treating egg allergy is to avoid egg altogether. This is not an easy thing to do, as egg is in many products, and children could accidentally be exposed to one or more of them. Egg is a common ingredient in processed foods and can be found in sauces, batters, baked goods, breakfast cereals, cake flours and mixes, candies, spaghetti, noodle soups, meatloaf, mayonnaise, many processed meats, and many, many other products.
One way to avoid it is to scrutinize food labels, but even then you have to be vigilant, because they may not say the word "egg", they may list egg proteins instead. For instance if the label mentions ovotransferrin, ovovitelia, ovovitellin, ovalbumin, ovoglobulin, ovomucin, ovomucoid, silici albuminate, simplesse, or vitellin, then it could mean an egg protein is present. Egg is also used to make cosmetics, shampoos and drugs, even the flu vaccine contains egg proteins. The advice from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America is:"Make sure to read all labels for foods, medicines, cosmetics, creams and ointments that may contain any type or amount of egg."
The Oral Immunotherapy (OIT) Trial
CoFAR carried out the OIT children's egg allergy trial at clinics in: Baltimore, Chapel Hill in North Carolina, Denver, Little Rock in Arkansas, and New York City. The point of the study was not only to test if daily OIT reduced or eliminated children's allergic responses to egg protein, but also whether this effect was sustained after therapy stopped.
The researchers recruited and then randomly assigned 55 children and teenagers aged from 5 to 18 years, all with egg allergy, to either the OIT treatment group or to the control group.The 40 children in the treatment group received a daily dose of egg OIT (egg white powder), while the 15 children in the control group received a placebo (cornstarch powder). The children took their daily doses at home and the researchers monitored both groups for 24 months.Every two weeks, the doses were increased, until the children in the egg OIT group were eating the equivalent of one third of an egg each day.
Oral Food Challenges
During the 24 months, the children also went back to the clinics three times for "oral food challenges". These took place at the end of month 10, month 22, and month 24. The maximum challenge was the equivalent of eating a whole egg. A reaction to the challenge that was observable by a doctor, such as wheezing, did not count as passing the challenge, only no reaction, or a transient reaction that could not be observed by a doctor, such as throat discomfort, counted as passing the challenge.At the end of month 10, when all children had the first food challenge, none of the placebo group passed it. But over half of the egg OIT group did.
At the end of month 22, all of the children in the egg OIT group underwent the second food challenge, whereupon 75% of them passed it.One of the study lead authors, A. Wesley Burks, is chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, one of the sites where the study took place. He said, At the beginning of the study, most of the participants were highly allergic to egg, but after months of daily egg OIT, we found that many of them could eat more than a whole egg without having a reaction.
Testing Long Term Benefit of Egg OIT
To find out if the egg OIT resulted in any long term benefits, the children who passed the second food challenge at 22 months, stopped taking the egg OIT for four to six weeks and then underwent another food challenge at the end of month 24. About 27% of them (11 of the original 40) passed this third food challenge. The researchers did not re-test any of the children in the placebo group because none had passed the earlier food challenges. The children in the OIT group who passed the third challenge were allowed to go on to eat egg or foods containing egg in their normal diets as often as they wanted to. After another year of follow up, none of them reported any symptoms. The researchers suggest their findings reveal two types of benefit from egg OIT, the first being that while on egg OIT, most of the children could safely be exposed to egg, and the second being that around a quarter of them were able eat egg as part of their normal diet even after they stopped the OIT.
Co-lead author, Stacie Jones, professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, another of the study sites, also pointed to a third, indirect, benefit, Reducing these kids' allergic response to egg also lessened parental anxiety over how their children might react if accidently exposed to egg at school or at someone else's house.
(Source- New England Journal of Medicine)
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