Food Allergy Living Blog Tagged Results

Many of you have little ones who suffered for weeks, months or even years before finally getting a diagnosis. The diagnosis may have been a food allergy, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), an eosinophilic disorder, food protein-induced enterocolitis syndrome (FPIES), multiple food protein intolerance (MFPI), or a similar allergy-related condition. The diagnosis explains your child’s symptoms and helps you manage them. Although you were likely relieved to have an answer and appropriate treatment plan, many of you were probably still left with many questions.

Research has given us many answers in recent years but there are many questions that still remain. Why did my child develop this condition? Is there any way to prevent this condition? What are the chances that siblings will develop the same condition? Is there a way to actually cure the underlying condition so that my child can eat a normal diet? The best way to get these answers is to support clinical research. There may be a research study on your child’s specific condition at a facility near you. Enrolling your children is the best way to get closer to the cause of these diseases and hopefully someday, the cure.

Finding a Clinical Trial

It’s easy to find trials on the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) website: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Here are some clinical trials (which are seeking participants) that may apply to your child’s condition:

• Food allergies;
• Eosinophilic disorders;
• Infants and children with GERD;
• Pediatric inflammatory bowel disease;
• Short bowel syndrome in children; and
• General studies on pediatric allergic disease.

Obviously, pediatric allergic diseases are getting more and more attention from researchers. By joining a clinical study, you can help strengthen the research and do your part to help find answers. You can refine your search for a clinical trial by location so that you can find a clinical trial near you. You can even see a list of studies on a map.

Questions You Should Ask Before Enrolling in a Clinical Trial

Before you enroll your child in a clinical study, it’s important to understand exactly what a clinical trial is. Here are the answers to some questions that you might have. Chances are that you may be a little wary about signing your child up to be a “guinea pig” for science. And that’s okay; it’s your job as a parent to be careful!

You should make sure that you get all the facts before you decide to participate. The National Institutes of Health actually has a website dedicated to clinical studies for children that provides information and guidance for parents. For example, they provide a printable document (http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/childrenandclinicalstudies/downloads/english/pdf/questions_to_ask.pdf) with questions that parents may want to ask when considering enrolling their child in a clinical study. Once you get all the information, your family can decide if participating in a clinical trial is right for you.

Have any of you participated in a clinical trial in the past? What has your experience been? Would you do it again?

- Mallory

We’ve posted before about Oral Immunotherapy, but since our last update about research by Johns Hopkins, a few more positive studies have been conducted. These studies show hope that Oral Immunotherapy could someday lead to a more effective treatment for those suffering from various food allergies.

If you are not familiar with Oral Immunotherapy, it is essentially building up a tolerance to a certain allergen by ingesting small quantities of it and gradually increasing the amount of the allergen the patient can safely eat. As you can imagine, this is a risky process and should not be attempted at home, but might become a refined enough treatment to one day be used by doctors in treating food allergies.

Though the thought of being able to get rid of allergies is exciting, it’s not quite time to start celebrating. The studies conducted have been relatively small, and not 100% successful. Some of those involved in the process have had anaphylactic reactions, and others have just been unsuccessful in increasing dosage. It’s also not clear whether patients need to keep on eating the allergen to maintain tolerance.

While a lot of research still needs to be done to determine if Oral Immunotherapy is a viable treatment, the idea that individuals with food allergies may not have to avoid certain foods for the rest of their lives is exciting. To read a recent story from the Washington Post about a 9 year old girl with severe milk allergies who has successfully undergone immunotherapy, click here.

You can also check out how many clinical trials are currently being conducted by doing a search at the National Institute of Health Clinical Trials Web site.

Let’s hope these studies go somewhere, and be sure to update us on any other promising allergy treatments out there that you hear about!

-Mallory