Genes Causing Peanut Allergy Found By Researchers

There are six genes identified by the Mount Sinai researchers which are responsible for activating hundreds of other genes in kids resulting in many severe allergic reactions to peanuts. A previous research shows that a peanut allergy can be prevented if a child is used to eating peanuts from an early stage.

Peanut Allergy Causing Genes

“This study highlights genes and molecular processes that could be targets for new therapies to treat peanut-allergy reactions and could be important to understanding how peanut allergy works overall,” said the study’s senior author, Supinda Bunyavanich, MD, MPH, Associate Professor, Pediatrics and Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai told Science Daily. “We still don’t completely understand everything that happens in the body during peanut-allergy reactions. We can use these genes to direct our studies of peanut allergy and hopefully, predict how strongly someone with peanut allergy will react.” This study seems to have taken ahead a previous one that identified a single gene associated with peanut allergy.

To carry out the research the team took blood samples of 40 children who were allergic to peanuts. “Other studies have looked at genes expressed in people with food allergies and compared them to people who don’t have food allergies,” said Dr. Bunyavanich. “One of the strengths of our study is that we looked at genes expressed over time in children actively reacting to peanut and followed that person throughout their reaction, which provided a detailed and comprehensive picture of what’s happening on the genetic and molecular level during a peanut-allergy reaction.”