Some people are born with allergies to some type of food such as peanuts, eggs, milk, and many others. The only way to prevent a reaction is for people with food allergies to completely avoid the food to which they are allergic. However, a US research team carried out a new study published in the Nature Medicine journal, in which it provided a solution that can enable people to eat foods they were deprived of.
The idea behind the solution presented by researchers at Brigham Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital, emerged from the new approaches to the individual microbiota -the bacteria that live in the gut of every individual- and its role in some diseases. The researchers assumed that the bacteria found in the human gut to protect people who do not suffer from allergy, cannot be found in ill people.
To prove their hypothesis, the team repeatedly collected fecal samples every four to six months from 56 infants who developed food allergies, finding many differences when comparing their microbiota to 98 infants who did not develop food allergies.
The researchers determined five or six species of bacteria derived from the human gut that belong to two species within the Clostridiales or the Bacteroidetes.
To understand how the bacteria species might be influencing food allergy susceptibility, the team also looked at immunological changes, both in the human infants and in mice. They found that the Clostridiales and Bacteroidetes consortia targeted two important immunological pathways and stimulated specific regulatory T cells, a class of cells that modulate the immune system, changing their profile to promote tolerant responses instead of allergic responses.
Co-author Georg Gerber, chief of the Division of Computational Pathology at the Brigham University, wrote in a report published on the university's website: "Being able to drill down from hundreds of microbial species to just five or six or so, helped us describing a treatment for a problem that sends someone every three minutes to the emergency room in the US."
"Our findings give us a proved treatment that we can now use to cure patients," he added.
