Blood wash saves child from allergies

(ANSA) - Rome, October 8 - A seven-year-old child has been saved from a serious food allergy by a special "blood wash" treatment practised for the first time in the world by Rome's Bambino Gesù children's hospital. The treatment 'washed' the child's blood of the antibodies responsible for his condition after pharmaceutical therapies proved ineffective. The boy, Michele, suffered a very serious form of allergy to foods, including milk, eggs, fish and fruit, which combined with asthma, caused a series of bad fits.
    Michele was one of an estimated 600,000 Italian children who suffer from food allergies every year.
    The most frequent allergies are to milk and eggs, though the conditions often improve as children grow.
    Michele's allergy was an "aggravated multiple" kind, doctors said, in which the level of the immunoglobulin E (IgE) in his blood, the antibody responsible for the allergy, was so high he could not take the drug usually prescribed for the condition, because of a series of serious side effects that would have manifested if he took it. The blood wash treatment is not considered a definite cure, but it has made it possible to bring the condition under control and significantly increased the boy's quality of life.
    As a result, it is a breakthrough that could open up new options for the treatment of extremely serious allergies such as the one Michele suffers from.
    The paper related to the ground-breaking treatment has been published by scientific journal Pediatrics.
    "The advantage of the new equipment," said Stefano Ceccarelli, head of the Apheresis Service at Bambino Gesù, "is that it enables us to eliminate a specific type of antibody from the blood, in this case the IgE, while maintaining all those substances that would have been be taken out of the blood circuit if traditional generic plasma-apheresis had been carried out. "Furthermore, thanks to the reduced volume of the blood that ends up in extracorporeal circulation (80 ml), it is also fit for patients of low weight, like children".
    Alessandro Flocchi, allergology chief at Bambino Gesù, said: "This procedure breaks new ground towards the treatment of allergies and is indicated for all children suffering from all the most serious forms of allergic disease, anaphylaxis, atopic dermatitis and serious asthma who cannot take the specific drugs".