Knowledge Shot: Can a positive mindset help treat peanut allergies

Peanut allergies are a common and severe type of food allergy.

In people who are allergic, peanuts can cause skin reactions, itching in the mouth and throat, digestive problems, shortness of breath, and even anaphylaxis, which requires a shot of adrenaline with an EpiPen and a trip to the emergency room.

A promising treatment for peanut allergies is oral immunotherapy—and the way it works is by giving someone with the allergy tiny traces of peanuts and increasing the dose gradually over time so that they can slowly get desensitized to them.

Doing this can trigger mild symptoms, and sometimes those symptoms make a person quit the treatment, but the symptoms may actually be a sign that the treatment is working. So how these mild symptoms are perceived really matters.

To better understand how patients’ perception of these mild symptoms can affect the outcome of the treatment researchers recruited 50 families with children aged 7 to 17 years old with peanut allergies, who were about to undergo oral immunotherapy.

The families were randomized into two groups.

In the first group, the families were told that the mild symptoms should be interpreted as evidence that the treatment is working.

In the second group, the families were told that the symptoms were an unfortunate side effect of the treatment.

Families came for a total of 8 visits over the course of seven months, to participate in small-group activities that are related to the treatment.

At each of these visits the messaging about the mild symptoms was reinforced.

Importantly, both groups were given identical instructions for oral immunotherapy and training in recognizing dangerous side-effects and how to use an EpiPen.

They also had equal access to helpful resources like over-the-phone staff support.

The only difference between the groups was the messaging about the symptoms.