Washington, March 1 (IANS) Is your child allergic to milk? Here's a simple but effective way to cure it. Just put a few drops of milk protein under the tongue and it will help the child overcome the problem.
The approach, known as SLIT (sublingual immune therapy), involves giving children small but increasingly higher doses of the food they are allergic to until their immune systems learn to tolerate the food without triggering allergic reactions or symptoms.
Previous research from Hopkins Children's Centre showed that a similar approach known as oral immunotherapy (consuming milk directly) can successfully treat children with milk allergies.
The current study suggests that both approaches could be effective in treating milk allergies in most patients, authors say, but that oral immunotherapy appears to be slightly more effective than SLIT.
While both approaches work by exposing the patient to progressively higher doses of the allergenic food, SLIT is done with lower doses -- and therefore with lower risk for a severe allergic reaction.
Researchers caution that both therapies can lead to violent allergic reactions in some patients and should be always done under a doctor's supervision.
"We are very excited to see that both approaches can achieve significant improvement in children with milk allergies...," says lead investigator Robert Wood, director of Allergy and Immunology at Hopkins Children's.
In the study, children aged between six and 17 were treated with milk drops under the tongue (SLIT) for several weeks until they built up their tolerance.
Once tolerance was achieved, the children were divided into two groups. One group continued its SLIT treatment while the other consumed milk powder by mouth (OIT).
After three months of treatment with increasingly higher doses of milk protein, all children underwent a food challenge, which involved drinking milk under a doctor's supervision.
All children in the "by mouth" group were able to drink on average seven times more milk without an allergic reaction or with mild symptoms compared to their baseline milk challenge before the treatment.
Around 90 percent of those treated with milk drops under the tongue (SLIT) were also able to do so, says a Johns Hopkins's release.
The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.