Recent studies have shown that many of us who think we have peanut allergies actually do not: we may be sensitive or intolerant of them, but not technically allergic. At issue is the precision of the standard allergy tests. It turns out that the tests tend to produce too many false positives, which means someone gets diagnosed with this food allergy when they don’t have it.

Why the big hubbub about this? With allergies, the recommended course of action is life-long avoidance. However, if you are sensitive to a food or intolerant of it, you may find you can avoid the food for a period of time and then reintroduce it to your diet.

Medical professionals have been objecting to the removal of a food from the diet without a full blown, “true” allergy. The reason is that you are removing a potential source of nutrition, which may mean you miss certain vital nutrients in the diet. In the case of peanuts, you are also removing an inexpensive and readily available source of protein.

In order to be more sure of a peanut allergy – without the risk and cost of a full food challenge – you can get a new type of blood test. It’s called component-resolved diagnostics, and it involves exposing blood samples to specific, purified peanut proteins. After the exposure, the IgE response is measured. This test reveals less false positives.

Sweden-based Phadia AB, which markets this new blood test, provided some of the funding for this research. There were also researchers on the project who were Phadia employees.

Source: MSNBC