Oral Immunotherapy for Food Allergy: Not Ready for Prime Time

Hugh A Sampson, MD, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute, explains why oral immunotherapy (OIT) for food allergy may be premature and its safety and effectiveness has not been established.

 In some cases, we can’t distinguish whether improvements with milk are the result of the therapy or whether a child is merely outgrowing the problem, as happens with milk allergies about 80% of the time.  In fact, the only OIT trial to date stringently controlling for the natural development of tolerance in food-allergic children failed to find a difference in outcome between treated and control subjects.

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