News Health and Medicine UNC researchers discover promising new treatment for egg allergy
| UNC researchers discover promising new treatment for egg allergy |
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| Thursday, July 19, 2012 | |
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Doctors currently have only one recommendation for people allergic to eggs: avoid eggs completely. But researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine recently found promise in doing just the opposite. Eating small amounts of egg every day for many months lowered the threshold for allergic reactions in 75 percent of egg-allergic children; 28 percent were able to incorporate egg into their regular diets after two years on the treatment. “It’s just what we had hoped for,” said Wesley Burks, MD, Curnen Distinguished Professor and Chair of the UNC Department of Pediatrics and the study’s lead author. “It’s what we anticipated based on earlier studies, but we weren’t sure it would happen. Almost a third of the children had a permanent change and were no longer egg-allergic.” For full release |