Milk Allergy Symptoms May Ease With Exposure
THURSDAY, Aug. 27 (HealthDay News) -- Children who are allergic to milk may be able to overcome their allergy by drinking increasingly higher doses of milk, a new study finds.
In 2008, researchers from Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore reported that children with a severe milk allergy could "retrain" their immune systems to tolerate milk and other dairy products by gradually consuming increasingly higher doses.
In the current study, researchers followed up with 18 children aged 6 to 16 whose symptoms had eased or gone away during the previous study.
When 13 of the 18 children returned to the clinic up to 17 months later, six continued to have no reaction after drinking 16 ounces of milk, twice the highest amount tested in the earlier study. Seven children had mild reactions, including itchy mouth, hives, sneezing and stomachache after drinking less than 16 ounces. One child needed medications for a cough, the researchers noted in a news release from Johns Hopkins.
Click here to comment on this article.The researchers also followed up with three children who could not drink more than 2.5 ounces at the end of the prior study. All three continued to drink milk daily with only mild reactions, and two were able to drink more than 2.5 ounces with few problems, the study authors found.
The study was published in the Aug. 10 online issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
One key to keeping the allergy at bay seems to be regular consumption of milk and dairy products, according to the study.
"We now have evidence from other studies that some children once successfully treated remain allergy-free even without daily exposure, while in others the allergies return once they stop regular daily exposure to milk," said senior author Dr. Robert Wood, director of Allergy & Immunology at Johns Hopkins Children's Center. "This may mean that some patients are truly cured of their allergy, while in others the immune system adapts to regular daily exposure to milk and may, in fact, need the exposure to continue to tolerate it."
The researchers also tested for milk allergy using skin-prick testing, a standard food allergy test.
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A new study published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology showed that most children who had a milk allergy as infants did not outgrow the disease before entering elementary school,
, milk allergy is still the most common food allergy, affecting 2 % to 3 % of that population,
Researchers found a "significantly different natural history of milk allergy than what had been reported in virtually all of the previous studies. ... They would have said that the vast majority of milk allergy is outgrown by age 3 and if not by 3 certainly by 5 or 6
The study found that 19 % of the group outgrew their allergy to milk by the age of 4; 42 % by the age of 8; 64 % by the age of 12. The study found that 79 % of the group outgrew their allergy to milk by the age of 16, which means one in five did not outgrow the milk allergy by that age.