Article 1: Oral Immunotherapy Shows Promise for Children with Egg Allergy

Oral immunotherapy with egg-white powder can lead to sustained unresponsiveness to the allergen in nearly a third of children with egg allergy, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study.

Researchers randomized 55 children (aged 5 to 11 years) with egg allergy to oral immunotherapy with egg-white powder or placebo. Immunotherapy lasted 22 months and involved dose-escalation on day one, a build-up phase, and a maintenance phase in which children consumed up to 2 g/day of egg-white powder (roughly equivalent to a third of an egg).

At 22 months, three quarters of immunotherapy recipients passed a 10-g egg-white powder challenge (no placebo recipient did). And 2 months after immunotherapy ended, 28% of treated children successfully ate a whole egg; these children were consuming eggs a year later.
In Journal Watch Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, David Amrol writes: "Although oral immunotherapy is our best chance for a food allergy cure, it is not ready for mainstream use until protocols are further refined. Patients who are not enrolled in clinical trials must continue to rely on allergen avoidance, patient education, and self-injectable epinephrine."

Article 2: Overweight and obese diabetics less likely to die

In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it has been found that people who are overweight or obese at the time of diabetes diagnosis are half as likely to die from any cause in a period from one to three decades. The study was a retrospective analysis of five other studies, and 12% of the study was normal weight at time of diagnosis. Further studies are needed, but researchers initially hypothesize that those classified as overweight or obese may actually have more lean muscle tissue than their normal weight counterparts. Clinicians with adult patients of normal weight with diabetes should take extra measures to ensure good health.

This article is another epiphany that flies in the face of conventional thinking. With recent findings that multivitamins may not pose benefits, wheat may irritate the GI tract and cause other problems, and now with the finding that being overweight may be a benefit, at least with what you ingest you should probably take recommendations by anyone with a grain of salt. Now that there is legislation promoting certain eating habits, I wonder how long it will be before they find out that the legislation pushed for counter indicated eating habits that resulted in poorer health for individuals? What will the civil suit be then?