New hope for food allergy sufferers?

Stanford doctor helping kids with multiple allergies

Imagine sending your child to school each day never knowing if they might come home.

That’s the fear many parents across the country, not because of accidents or child predators but food allergies. But there is new hope.

A study spearheaded by a Stanford University researcher may not just offer hope to kids with severe food allergies. It can tackle more than one allergy at once.

In an exam room at Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital in Mountain View, Alex Eiger, 8, has his mouth open wide.

“Ahhh….,” groans Alex, as he opens his jaw as far as he can to insert the first of more than a dozen peanuts.

A year ago, you would never have seen Alex get even close to this food. Alex is severely allergic to peanuts. In fact, he’s allergic to a number of foods.

“Eggs, peanuts and cashews,” says Alex.

Alex's mother, Diane, adds that pistachios are bad for him, too.

“The first time that I fed him the tiniest speck of scrambled egg,” his mother says, recounting the day he was a baby, “he broke into hives in about 30 seconds.”

It wasn’t just hives, either. Alex grew lethargic and began to drool.

He was so young at the time, just a 1-year-old, that they had to wait another six months to test him for allergies. Until then, his family had to avoid any of the top eight or 10 foods that are typically the most allergic.

Neither Diane nor her husband have allergies, nor does their oldest daughter, Samantha. Having a son with an allergy as basic as eggs changed their entire lives.

“The next day that you find out your child has food allergies and you're almost grieving for normalcy,” Diane says, “because everything is scary.”

Scarier still, for Alex’s family, was the times that he wasn’t at home. If he was at a friend’s house, or even at school, Alex’s family had no control over what foods were around him.

“If my friends were having peanut butter and jelly,” Alex says of his school lunches, “I would have to go to a different table.”

In an effort to avoid the exposure to foods that made him deathly ill, Alex was separated from those friends. He had to carry an emergency plan and a self-injecting needle of a medication called epinephrine with him in case he had an allergic reaction. The best advice the Eigers could find, though, was to just try to keep Alex away from those foods.

“All you're told is avoid these foods, and every day is a risk,” says Diane Eiger.

But then one day, through a parent’s group, Eiger heard a talk from Doctor Kari Nadeau.

Nadeau was speaking about a groundbreaking study that helped kids with allergic reactions to foods by doing the unthinkable: giving them the very foods that caused their allergic reactions.

“They give very small amounts of the very foods that you're allergic to and that process is called desensitization,” Nadeau said.

Nadeau, a tall, energetic doctor who is immediately passionate about her subject material, is quick to point out that she’s not the only doctor doing these kinds of “de-sensitization” studies.

During her research, however, Nadeau found that most kids aren’t allergic to just one food.

Given that it takes anywhere from one to three years for a patient to get used to the foods, it could take years, maybe even decades for children to be able to eat the foods that had put them into shock.

“In a person's lifetime, if they have five allergies, that could take them 15 years,” says Nadeau.

But Nadeau found that multiple foods could be used at the same time.

Now she’s doing research, approved and partially funded by the Food and Drug Administration, that allows her to give kids up to five foods at once to desensitize them.

The process starts with nearly microscopic amounts of the food ground into a kind of flour that the kids then eat.

“It's like a little staircase,” points out Alex. “Every time I come here they'd give me a little bit more.”

“If it's safe, you work your way up to a teaspoon and this process occurs for up to two to three years,” Nadeau said.

This is what Alex did, and now he’s graduated the Nadeau study.

Yet, there is a caveat to the study. Nadeau’s study has found that it’s possible, maybe even probable, that the allergic reaction would return if patients stop eating the foods. Therefore, the foods that the kids were allergic to have to be eaten every day.

Alex now eats 16 peanuts, 16 cashews and one whole egg every day.

But for Alex’s mother and her family, it’s worth the process.

From the exam room, Alex extolls the virtues of his new found love of Chinese food -- wonton soup is his favorite dish -- and the fact he can choose nearly any birthday cake for his upcoming celebration.

Eiger said it’s not just the relief of being able to eat new foods. It’s far deeper than that.

“You hear stories about the birthday parties and the cupcakes and being able to eat these foods, and that's nice,” says Eiger. “Taking away the daily fear, that your child, when they walk out the door to go to school, you don't know if they're coming back because of somebody else touching them."

She added that food allergies could have put Alex in the emergency room, or even killed him.

Taking away that daily anxiety and daily fear, Diane says, is huge.

Nadeau is quick to point out, though, that her research is not a cure. She points to the fact that Alex has to eat the foods every day, or the allergic reactions could return.

Alex still carries an epi-pen, an emergency plan, and Benadryl at all times.

Nadeau, however, is hopeful that in the future her process, which is essentially like creating a new drug, could come in capsule form, like antibiotics, and given in packs of carefully metered doses by doctors.

She adds that until they know what has caused these allergies, they won’t find a cure.

In fact, studies, she says, have shown that the number of kids who “grow out” of their allergies as they age has drastically dropped. Yet the number of food allergies has risen.

Still, she sees great hope in these studies.

It is critical, Nadeau says, that parents or general practitioners not try to do this desensitization themselves. Nadeau’s study is heavily monitored by the FDA and each dose is carefully monitored.

If you want to find out more about the studies that Nadeau is conducting, you can find them here: