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| |  Non-Invasive Therapy For Common Allergies LONDON, ENGLAND -- February 27, 1998 -- Allergies are caused by an over-reaction of the immune system to otherwise harmless substances. Immunotherapy, an allergy treatment, seeks to retrain the immune system by exposure to small then larger amounts of the allergy-producing protein, commonly by injection under the skin. Treatment can decrease patients' symptoms. Unfortunately, the injections must be given frequently, sometimes more than once a week, for many months to years. In this week's The Lancet, Dr. Giovanni Passalacqua and colleagues at Genoa University, Italy, report the results of a trial in which patients received immunotherapy as tablets placed under the tongue (sublingual) for a short time, then swallowed. The study recruited 20 patients with allergies to house-dust mites that caused itchy, runny noses and itchy eyes (rhinoconjunctivitis). Ten patients were randomly assigned sublingual immunotherapy, a tablet containing the dust-mite allergen and 10 were assigned an inactive placebo tablet that would produce no effect. Patients recorded symptoms in diaries and underwent a series of tests to assess changes in their immune responses to the allergen before starting the trial and after 12 and 24 months of treatment. The investigators found that the patients on immunotherapy reported significantly fewer symptoms of rhinoconjunctivitis during the winter months, when these allergies are their worst, than those on placebo. In addition, when patients were exposed to allergens directly on to the eye after one year of treatment, laboratory tests showed that the signs of inflammation were significantly fewer in the patients receiving immunotherapy. In a commentary, Dr Patrick Holt and colleagues of the Institute for Child Health and Research in West Perth, Australia, write that, although there has been considerable scepticism about sublingual/oral immunotherapy, there is increasing experimental evidence that suggests this form of therapy may indeed be effective. What is needed are more and larger controlled clinical trials similar to that conducted by the researchers in Genoa, the researchers write.
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