Case report Open Access
Egg allergy is one of the most common food allergies in children. To date, oral immunotherapy (OIT) has been considered as a promising treatment option for egg allergy. However, safety issues remain concerning severe adverse events requiring epinephrine injection. Hence, establishing a safer method to treat egg allergy would be beneficial. We report here two children with egg allergy who were safely treated with sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) before transitioning to OIT.
Patient 1 was a 7-year-old girl and Patient 2 was a 5-year-old girl. Although OIT for egg had been attempted in both patients, severe anaphylactic symptoms were induced by ingesting only 0.1 g of heated whole egg. Therefore, SLIT was conducted with aqueous suspensions consisting of water and heated whole egg powder. Suspensions were administered sublingually, kept in the mouth for 2 min, and spat out immediately thereafter. SLIT was continued for 7 months for Patient 1 and 8 months for Patient 2 due to the exploratory character of the study. Afterwards, the patients successfully transferred to low-dose OIT with 1 g of heated whole egg (≒170 mg of egg protein) daily, and are continuing the therapy as of June 2020. As for adverse reactions, Patient 1 expressed oral cavity itchiness once at the beginning of SLIT. Patient 2 had no adverse reaction. The levels of antigen-specific IgE decreased in both patients after SLIT, and further decreased after switching to OIT.
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