Department of Medicine, University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, Campus Box B164, 12700 East 19th Avenue, Room 10002, Aurora, CO 80045, USA.
Curr Allergy Asthma Rep. 2011 Aug;11(4):334-9. doi: 10.1007/s11882-011-0201-z.
Food allergies are an important medical problem in Westernized countries. Allergy to peanuts is a dramatic example of a food allergy that tends to be particularly severe and long-lived. This article examines food allergy-specifically peanut allergy-from the perspective that tolerance to foods is a normal state, just as tolerance to self-proteins is a normal state. From this vantage point, loss of tolerance to foods in food-allergic individuals can be viewed as parallel to the loss of tolerance to self-proteins in those with autoimmune diseases. Although our knowledge base is far from satisfactory, there are important similarities in the immunologic abnormalities that are characteristic of both peanut allergy and several autoimmune diseases. Delineation of these similarities may open the door to new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of severe food allergies.
食物过敏是西方国家的一个重要医学问题。对花生的过敏是食物过敏的一个戏剧性例子，往往特别严重且持久。本文从这样一个角度来研究食物过敏，具体来说是花生过敏，即耐受食物是一种正常状态，就像耐受自身蛋白是一种正常状态一样。从这个角度来看，食物过敏个体对食物的耐受性丧失，可以看作与自身免疫性疾病患者对自身蛋白的耐受性丧失是类似的。尽管我们的知识基础还远远不够完善，但花生过敏和几种自身免疫性疾病的特征性免疫异常之间存在重要的相似性。阐明这些相似性可能为治疗严重食物过敏开辟新的治疗方法。
