Metabolites may be useful biomarkers of peanut allergy

As current food allergy diagnostic methods are either too costly and time-consuming or not sufficiently sensitive and specific to discriminate patients with and without clinical symptoms, many research projects are underway to identify markers that are strongly associated with food allergy or tolerance that can be used for the diagnosis of food allergy.

Recent work out of the Netherlands investigated whether metabolites can be found that discriminate between peanut-allergic patients and non-peanut-allergic subjects. Identifying such metabolites may be the first step to developing peanut allergy-specific biomarkers.

Plasma and saliva samples were obtained from 23 participants (12 peanut allergic and 11 peanut tolerant) before and after a peanut challenge. Clear differences were observed between peanut-allergic and peanut-tolerant subjects in both plasma and saliva samples following analysis with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and subsequent multivariate data analysis. Interestingly, results from samples taken before the peanut challenge already featured abnormal metabolite levels in the peanut-allergic participants.

The findings of this pilot study will now need to be replicated on a larger scale to determine whether metabolite levels as determined using these methods may serve as novel biomarkers for food allergy.

Reference: Peeters et al. 2011. International Archives of Allergy and Immunology. Vol155. pp. 23-30. DOI: 10.1159/000318654.