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.
The researchers also followed up with three children who could not drink more than 2.5 ounces at the end of the prior study.
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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.