At 7am every day, Alex Dixon eats six peanut M&Ms, popping them into his mouth one at a time.
For most children it might be considered an unusual breakfast, but for this 12-year-old it is nothing short of miraculous. Eight months ago, a single M&M could have been catastrophic. Since September, Alex, from Whitley Bay near Newcastle, has been part of a £2.5 million clinical trial attempting to beat childhood allergies by desensitising the sufferers.
Funded by the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, the trial aims to show that allergies can be overcome by gradually giving children greater quantities of the very foods that pose the danger.
The charity was set up by the parents of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died in 2016 after reacting to sesame baked into a Pret A Manger baguette bought at Heathrow before a flight to Nice. She went into anaphylactic shock.
At present 146 children are taking part in the trial, all of them allergic to peanuts or cow’s milk. Eventually, the researchers want to recruit 275 people aged between two and 23 across nine British hospitals.
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To begin with, Alex was understandably anxious. “I had been told my whole life to not go near peanuts,” he said. “I was nervous.”
The first step, taken at the Great North Children’s Hospital in Newcastle, was to determine exactly how much peanut Alex could cope with before he suffered an anaphylactic reaction.
With doctors watching carefully, it did not take long. “He came out in huge hives everywhere,” said his mother, Susan, 46. “They appeared on the back of the legs and before you knew it they were everywhere and he was wheezing.” Quick use of an EpiPen stopped the reaction. A doctor offered to administer the injection but Alex insisted on doing it himself. “He was very brave and he used the pen and the anaphylactic shock just stopped.”
Once doctors had worked out his tolerance, he started eating half a Reese’s Puff every morning. Each individual breakfast cereal “puff” contains a tiny sliver of a peanut.
Every two weeks Alex would come back and eat a bigger dose under close supervision. After a while he switched to M&Ms, working up to the six he is now eating each day.
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Grace Fisher, five, has gone through the same process for cow’s milk, increasing from 3ml to 120ml over the course of a few months. “Now she has a hot chocolate each evening and she really enjoys it,” said her mother, Emma, 39, from Spennymoor in Co Durham.
Dr Louise Michaelis, a consultant paediatrician in immunology, who is leading the Newcastle arm of the trial, said: “We incrementally increase the dose over a year so the immune system learns that the food is not a threat any more, and doesn’t trigger an allergic reaction. The immune system has become desensitised, the child becomes tolerant. The aim for now is reduce that awful risk of having an unpredicted anaphylaxis. But in the long term, as we follow these patients into adult services, we hope to potentially have a cure.”
Don’t try this at home
Some scientists say that a cure would technically be achieved only if the allergy were completely switched off. With this approach, the allergy is kept at bay only if patients continue to regularly eat small amounts of the food. But experts believe a remarkable prospect is within reach: that eventually these children and their families can stop worrying about their diet altogether.
Michaelis warned parents not to attempt to desensitise their children at home, however. “Some children will not be suitable for this approach — not all will be able to tolerate it. So it is really important that this is not attempted without really strict medical supervision,” she said.
For Alex and his fellow participants the trial has already had a huge impact. “In the back of my mind there has always been anxiety of what would happen if Alex comes into contact with peanuts accidentally,” Susan said. “It’s been a constant running anxiety. I’ve kept that fear away from him — I’ve tried to tell him he can live a full life. But for me it has been a fear that I constantly live with.”
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‘There was nothing for us … Now there is hope’
Natasha’s mother, Tanya Ednan-Laperouse, 57, said after her daughter’s death that she, her husband, Nadim, 59, and their son, Alex, 21, had focused on campaigning for all allergens to be listed as ingredients.
During the course of the campaign for Natasha’s Law, she realised that there was a pathway to a potential treatment if only they could get funding. The foundation drummed it up from the food industry.
“When Natasha was a baby, I went to a seminar about the medical research happening in the world of food allergies,” Ednan-Laperouse said. “It was the most depressing afternoon, because none of it had any positive outcomes. There was nothing for us and no hope.
“Natasha would be 23 years old if she was alive today. What we are really feeling now is that there is hope. When we speak to these kids, they can talk about how it has already changed their lives, it’s absolutely amazing.”
She added: “My dream is to expand this so whatever your food allergy is you could get a protocol like this. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Scientists don’t like to talk about cures. But when we speak to scientists and we ask them if it is possible to cure food allergies, they believe it can be done. I would like to see that in my lifetime.”
