Improving diagnosis of kiwifruit allergy

Monday, 18 January 2010 13:31

Component-resolved diagnostics in food allergy, involving panels of pure allergen molecules or arrays of peptides derived from allergen sequences, has been shown in several studies to lead to improved sensitivity of serological diagnosis and to provide more accurate information on the clinical status of patients.

Dr Sean Bulley from the Plant and Food Research Institute in Auckland New Zealand and collaborators from throughout Europe have conducted a study to evaluate the use of individual purified natural and recombinant kiwifruit allergens for component-resolved in vitro diagnosis of kiwifruit allergy.

Thirty patients with a positive double-blind placebo-controlled food challenge to kiwifruit, 10 atopic subjects with negative open provocation to kiwifruit, and 5 nonatopic subjects were enrolled in the study. Specific IgE to 7 individual kiwifruit allergens (nAct d 1-5 and rAct d 8-9) and allergen extracts was measured by ImmunoCAP.

Use of single kiwifruit allergen ImmunoCAP was found to increase the quantitative test performance and diagnostic sensitivity compared with the commercial extract.

Reference: Bublin et al. 2010. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. DOI: 10.1016/j.jaci.2009.10.017