Having a peanut allergy can be more than an inconvenience. There’s a new skin patch in the works that hopes to end peanut allergies once and for all!
It’s post-Halloween morning, and that means it’s time to sort through your children’s Halloween haul of candy this year. You’ll encounter all sorts of candies and chocolates, from lip-pursing Sour Patch kids to decadent peanut butter cups.
If your kids are allergic to peanuts however, we can only imagine the heavy heart you have when you need to toss all those Reese’s products in the trash. Everyone agrees there’s no better combo than chocolate and peanut butter, perhaps only rivaled by McCartney and Lennon, or baseball and Sunday night.
Too bad this wearable skin patch for children isn’t yet available, which is said to help offset peanut allergies. The new patch works by delivering small doses of peanut protein through the user’s skin and into their body.
Published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the study found almost half of the subjects that used the Viaskin Peanut patch for 12 months could intake 10 times more peanut protein than they could pre-patch.
The four to 11-year-old age group enjoyed the most benefits from the patch, while participants under 12 didn’t see too much of an effect, making it ideal for younger children.
By distributing peanut protein throughout the user’s body, the patch ‘trains’ the immune system to slowly adapt to peanuts through the small periods of exposure, explains Dr. Daniel Rotrosen of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, which is funding the ongoing clinical trial.
“Other recent advances have relied on an oral route that appears difficult for approximately 10 to 15 percent of children and adults to tolerate,” Rotrosen said.
Initial trails have been deemed “potentially effective,” though the studies have been limited. Further tests will be required, in order to discover if “the modest clinical changes noted will be enhanced after a longer duration of therapy,” say the researchers.
The Viaskin Peanut patch has yet to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Photo Credit: Meryll/Shutterstock
