TEXAS – Typically when your child has a food allergy, you're paranoid to let them anywhere near the foods that could possibly kill them, but one little boy in Friendswood eats all the foods he’s allergic to for breakfast: peanuts, hazelnuts, and eggs.
“His poison became his cure,” his mother, Katie Larson, explained.
To reduce the risk of life-threatening allergic reactions, researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine study the use of oral immunotherapy, meaning doctors expose the boy to peanut proteins to desensitize him to the allergen. Only a handful of oral immunotherapy programs exist in Texas, none in Houston, so the Larsons frequently drive to Dallas for therapy sessions.
“It's scary the first day when you go in and you're giving your child the very thing that you have avoided for so long, but it's all done medically supervised. It's amounts that fly under the radar of the body. It hasn't been all smooth, there's been a couple times of vomiting,” Katie Larson said. “When a reaction like that happens, you go back down to an amount you could tolerate it and you hang out there for another week or two and you try again to go up and usually the body tolerates it.”
Dr. Stacy Silvers, of Allergy Partners of North Texas, started Brendan on small doses of peanut protein, in capsules, sprinkled on food. Each of his allergies took six months to build tolerance to before he started eating the whole foods.
“The first allergen we did was egg, so they started with microscopic amounts of egg until he could consume an entire egg,” Katie Larson said. “For a year now he's been eating an egg every single day.”
Silvers said 80 percent of the children who go through the program build enough tolerance for peanuts that they no longer have allergic reactions to them.
"We have been starting kids age five and older in the program, but with this recent study that came out, in the very near future, we plan to start treating the younger kids," Silvers said.
Next week will be Brendan's first taste of freedom as he heads to the happiest place on Earth without restrictions.
“I’m going to Disneyworld in a week and a half, and I’ll get to eat every single food and my mom won't have to interview every single chef,” he said.
Needless to say, both Brendan and his mom call this socially liberating.
This kind of treatment will never be approved by the FDA, because they only approve medications, not practices. That does not mean parents should try this at home; children should be monitored in a medical office while exposing them to allergens, since food allergies can be deadly.