SUNDAY, Jan. 4 (HealthDay News) — An apple a day while you’re pregnant may indeed keep the doctor away. But the real beneficiary could be your unborn child.
Recent research suggests that when moms-to-be eat apples during pregnancy, their offspring have lower rates of asthma.
And, mothers who consume fish during pregnancy may lower their child’s risk of developing the allergic skin condition called eczema.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Contrary to widespread recommendations, the consumption of peanuts in infancy is associated with a low prevalence of peanut allergy, the results of a new study suggest.
“Our study findings raise the question of whether early introduction rather than avoidance of peanut in infancy is the better strategy for the prevention of peanut allergy,” write researchers in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Direct administration of an allergen - the substance that triggers an allergic reaction — into the lymph nodes, rather than the skin, reduces both the number and dose of injections required to induce tolerance to the offending substance, researchers report. This appears to offer a rapid, save and effective way to treat IgE-mediated allergies.
We demonstrated that this approach enhanced safety, efficacy, and compliance. The procedure allowed “reduction of the number of injections from 54 to 3, and reduction in the cumulative allergen dose by more than 1000-fold,” Dr. Thomas M. Kundig from University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Child food allergies are up 18% over the last decade, the CDC reports.
Four out of every 100 U.S. kids under age 18 now suffer food allergies, which doubles their risk of asthma and triples their risk of skin or respiratory allergies.
“It is a significant trend — food allergies do appear to be continuously increasing over the decade,” CDC health statistician Amy Barnum, MSPH , tells WebMD. “And if you look at hospital discharges with any diagnosis related to food allergy, there has been a significant increase.”
TUESDAY, Nov. 11 — A Swiss-led study appears to point the way toward a faster, safer and less painful treatment for grass pollen allergy by using direct injections into the lymph node.
Compared with traditional under-the-skin shot regimens lasting several years and involving dozens of injections, the new method appears to offer patients the same degree of relief — with fewer side effects — with just three shots over two months.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Milk may be a treatment for milk allergy. In a carefully controlled study, researchers from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and Duke University found that giving milk-allergic children milk in increasingly higher doses over time eased their allergic reactions to milk and even helped some of the children completely overcome their milk allergy.
The findings suggest that giving milk-allergic children milk “gradually retrains the immune system to completely disregard or to better tolerate the allergens in milk that previously caused allergic reactions,” Dr. Robert Wood, senior investigator on the study and director of Allergy & Immunology at Hopkins Children’s in Baltimore, noted in a statement.