Allergic to peanuts? You could take a pill to change that, study suggests

If you’re allergic to peanuts, there might be a pill you can take to fix that.

Australian researchers discovered that taking a pill filled with probiotics and peanuts can lead to a peanut tolerance — even up to four years after the last dose.

The study, published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, tracked 48 children, half of whom were given a pill with the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus and peanut protein. The other half were given a placebo.

Both groups took the pill for 18 months, according to The Guardian.

“Our findings show that combined probiotic and peanut oral immunotherapy provides long-lasting clinical benefit compared with placebo,” the authors write in the paper, “with two-thirds of treated participants symptom free after peanut ingestion 4 years after completing treatment.”

The original trial ended in 2013; at its end, 82 percent of the children who received the probiotic pill were considered tolerant to peanuts. Only four percent in the placebo group were declared tolerant.

And four years later, those results largely remained the same — 70 percent of the children originally deemed tolerant passed a second test that confirmed long-term tolerance.

Prof Mimi Tang, the lead researcher on the study, told BBC it is especially important to note that the children largely remained tolerant to peanuts regardless of the frequency with which they ate them.

"The importance of this finding is that these children were able to eat peanuts like children who don't have peanut allergy and still maintain their tolerant state, protected against reactions to peanuts," she said.

Tang said there was a noticeable drop in anxiety for children who were once allergic to peanuts but now are considered tolerant.

“The way I see it is that we had children who came into the study allergic to peanuts, having to avoid peanuts in their diet, being very vigilant around that, carrying a lot of anxiety with that,” she said. “At the end of treatment and even four years later, many of these children who had benefited from our probiotic peanut therapy could now live like a child who didn’t have peanut allergy.”

This story was originally published August 17, 2017 at 11:36 AM with the headline "Allergic to peanuts? You could take a pill to change that, study suggests."