Micro-dosing can reverse peanut allergy

Micro-dosing with small amounts of peanut butter can help people overcome the life-threatening allergy.

It’s a better strategy than avoiding any contact with peanuts as any accidental encounter could be fatal, say researchers from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Micro-dosing—and slowly increasing the amount—is an effective therapy for people who can tolerate digesting half a peanut, considered a high-threshold peanut allergy that affects around 800,000 children in the US.

Around half of people who are allergic to nuts suffer from a high-threshold allergy, and they can be helped by micro-dosing.  For their study, the researchers recruited 73 children, who either micro-dosed or avoided nuts.  Those given peanuts started with one-eighth of a teaspoon of peanut butter every day before increasing the dose slightly every eight weeks until they were eating one tablespoon of peanut butter by the end of the 18-month study.

In a follow-up test, all 32 of the children in the micro-dosing group were able to consume nine grams—the equivalent of three tablespoons—of peanut butter in one go.

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