Weighing the risks, rewards in peanut allergy desensitization studies

A new study underscores the need to evaluate the risks and rewards of desensitization therapy, an increasingly popular way to possibly treat peanut allergies. The treatment is risky: People are given trace amounts of peanuts to gauge how much they can tolerate before they have a reaction. In the paper, researchers looked at data from a dozen studies that evaluated an oral immunotherapy versus either placebo or not ingesting any peanuts at all. Unsurprisingly, exposing people to peanuts carries a higher risk of anaphylaxis. The takeaway, however, isn’t that oral immunotherapies are inherently bad — in fact, the review found they did induce desensitization. Instead, the authors say that those developing anti-allergy therapies ought to take patient preference and acceptable trade-offs into account.