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For people with peanut allergies, undergoing immunotherapy may actually increase their risk of having allergic or anaphylactic reactions.
Immunotherapy is an experimental treatment for allergies that involves repeated exposure to the allergen in gradually increasing doses, aiming to desensitise the patient’s immune system.
To get a better understanding of how safe and effective it is, Derek Chu of McMaster University, Canada, and colleagues compiled data from 12 trials involving 1041 patients in total, most of them children aged five to 12. Some of the trials compared immunotherapy with …