Endpoints and Outcomes After Immunotherapy for Food Allergy: What Is Meaningful for Patients?

Patient-Reported Outcome Measures in Food and Drug Allergy

A patient-reported outcome is directly reported by the patient without interpretation of the patient's response by anyone else. It refers to the patient's health (symptoms and feelings), quality of life, or functional status associated with health care or treatment. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are defined as the tools or instruments that are used to measure patient-reported outcomes. Health-related quality of life has been the most studied psychosocial PROM in food allergy, using validated questionnaires. In drug allergy, PROMs are useful in capturing patients' experiences of potential allergic reactions, including subjective symptoms such as headache, dizziness, or fatigue. Patient-reported outcome measures can also help differentiate true allergies from side effects or other nonallergic reactions and inform decisions about drug challenges and de-labeling strategies. Ensuring the chosen tool is validated for the specific allergy context is crucial for accurate data collection. Integrating patient-reported experiences alongside traditional methods can lead to more accurate assessments and personalized care.

Flex-IT! Applying "Platform Trials" Methodology to Immunotherapy for Food Allergy in Research and Clinical Practice

There is an increasing trend in the management of food allergy toward active treatment using allergen immunotherapy (AIT). Although AIT is efficacious, treatment-related adverse events are common, particularly with oral immunotherapy in those with high levels of allergen-specific IgE sensitization. In clinical practice, these adverse events inevitably create challenges: clinicians and patients routinely face decisions whether to alter the dose itself, the frequency of dosing, and the pace of escalation, or indeed discontinue AIT altogether. Flexibility is therefore needed to adapt treatment, particularly in clinical practice, so that participants are "treated-to-target." For example, this may entail a significant change in the dosing protocol or even switching from one route of administration to another in response to frequent adverse events. We refer to this approach as flexible immunotherapy. However, there is little evidence to inform clinicians as to what changes to treatment are most likely to result in treatment success. Classical clinical trials rely, by necessity, on relatively rigid updosing protocols. To provide an evidence base to optimize AIT, the food allergy community should adopt adaptive platform trials, where a "master protocol" facilitates more efficient evaluation, including longer-term outcomes of multiple interventions. Within a single clinical trial, participants are able to switch between different treatment arms; interventions can be added or dropped without compromising the integrity of the trial. Developing platform trials for food AIT may initially be costly, but they represent a significant opportunity to grow the evidence base (with respect to both treatment outcomes and biomarker discovery) at scale. In addition, they could help understand longitudinal disease trajectories that are difficult to study in clinical trials for food allergy due to the time needed to demonstrate changes in efficacy. Finally, their adoption would achieve greater collaboration and consistency in approaches to proactive management of food allergy in routine clinical practice. As a community, we need to actively pursue this with funders and established research collaborations to deliver the very best outcomes for our patients and their families.

Anthropological and sociological perspectives on food allergy

This review explores the anthropological and sociological literature on food allergy and identifies four primary areas of research to date. The first explores the relationality and management of risk, uncertainty and stigma among parents and sufferers of food allergies. The second analyses the influence of intersectionality, specifically the effects of class, gender, race/ethnicity and disability on experiences of food allergy. The third discusses diagnostic difficulties and the impact these have on legitimacy and believability, both in the context of clinician-patient relations and in managing food allergies in public spaces. The fourth explores the ethics and uncertainties in food allergy treatments and how scientific knowledge of emerging treatments is constructed. This body of research illustrates that although an individual disease, food allergy experiences are significantly affected by socio-cultural structures, institutions, ideologies and discourses. The review concludes with four primary recommendations. First, there should be more incorporation of anthropological or sociological methodologies and perspectives into studies of food allergy. Second, studies are needed from more countries exploring lived experience of food allergy. Third, research on food allergy needs to incorporate an analysis of intersectional factors such as gender, class and race/ethnicity, and should explore the experiences of minority populations. Fourth, more research is needed on the interactions between biomedicine and local systems of knowledge, as well as the factors that shape what treatments become available, for whom it becomes available, experiences of treatment and aspects (including biases) that influence patient-clinician interactions.