Risky therapy may cream peanut allergy

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1. Brett
   

   Scientists have the first evidence that life-threatening peanut allergies may be cured one day.
   
   A few kids now are allergy-free thanks to a scary treatment — tiny amounts of the very food that endangered them.
   
   Don’t try this at home. Doctors monitored the youngsters closely in case they needed rescue, But over several years, the children’s bodies learned to tolerate peanuts. Immune-system tests show no sign of remaining allergy in five youngsters, and others can withstand amounts that once would have left them wheezing or worse, scientists reported Sunday.
   
   Are the five cured? Doctors at Duke University Medical Center and Arkansas Children’s Hospital must track them years longer to be sure.
   
   “We’re optimistic that they have lost their peanut allergy,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Wesley Burks, Duke’s allergy chief. “We’ve not seen this before medically. We’ll have to see what happens to them.”
   
   More rigorous research is under way to confirm the pilot study, released Sunday at a meeting of the American Academy of Asthma and Immunology. If it pans out, the approach could mark a major advance for an allergy that afflicts 1.8 million people in the United States.and there’s no way to dice a peanut as small as the treatment doses required.

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