Two Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) researchers have been awarded grants to advance research into childhood food allergies.
Dr Tim Brettig and Kayla Parker received the Allergy and Immunology Foundation of Australasia (AIFA) grants for their projects, which aim to improve treatments and allergy prevention strategies for children with nut allergy.
Nut allergy occurs in up to 3 per cent of Australian children. While most reactions are mild, peanuts and tree nuts, especially cashews, are a common cause of anaphylaxis.
Dr Brettig was awarded a $15,000 AIFA DBV Technologies Food Allergy Research Grant to advance research into an oral immunotherapy (a form of allergy treatment) for children who are allergic to multiple nuts.
Image: Dr Tim Brettig
The study will analyse results from a previous MCRI trial that investigated a low dose multi-nut oral immunotherapy versus standard care, which involves strict allergen avoidance.
"The outcomes of this study will provide crucial evidence for the use of oral immunotherapy in babies with multiple-nut allergies and, if successful, could not only reduce healthcare costs, but also be life-changing for these children and their families," Dr Brettig said.
Dr Brettig was a Centre for Food Allergy Research (CFAR) PhD Scholar during his PhD and is now a National Allergy Centre for Excellence (NACE) Postdoctoral Fellow. Both national research bodies are hosted at MCRI to help accelerate allergic disease research across Australia.
Ms Parker received a $10,000 AIFA Early Career and New Researcher Grant (Allergy) for her project, which will involve peanut-allergic babies from the TreEat study, to test if early introduction of tree nuts can prevent tree nut allergy in those at high-risk.
Image: Kayla Parker
Food challenges, which involve a patient eating small and increasing amounts of an allergen in a medical clinic, are the gold standard in allergy testing. However, wait lists are long and some centres only offer challenges to staple foods such as egg, milk or peanut.
"Due to the increased risk of developing multi-nut allergies, infants with a peanut allergy often undergo tree nut screening tests, which analyse the patient's blood, instead of food challenges to check their allergy status before introducing tree nuts into their diet," she said.
"Unfortunately, there is a lack of evidence to support avoiding tree nuts based on screening results alone, and delaying tree nut ingestion further increases the risk of a child developing a tree nut allergy."
Ms Parker said the research would provide world-first evidence on whether infants with a peanut allergy can safely introduce tree nuts into their diet irrespective of screening results, and potentially inform clinicians about better tree nut allergy prevention strategies.
