What is a Food Desensitization?
The Confidence of Knowing
Food desensitization is a relatively new way of thinking about treating food allergies. In the past, doctors used to encourage parents to delay the introduction of potentially allergenic foods into their child’s diet until after the age of one. Unfortunately, this ended up being bad advice. The seminal LEAP trial (and other subsequent studies) showed that early and repeated exposure to peanut-containing foods significantly reduces a child’s chance of developing a peanut allergy. This started a wave of change in how allergists treated food-allergic patients.
We began focusing less on strict food avoidance (although this is still important for many patients) and more on finding ways to prevent and treat food allergies using the early and slow introduction of allergenic foods. Food desensitization builds off of this concept. Food allergy desensitization involves the very slow introduction of foods (in a safe, monitored manner) to build up the body’s tolerance to them. In doing so, it reduces you or your child’s chance of having a severe anaphylactic reaction. The goal of this process is to reduce the severity or prevent severe allergic reactions.
