Eating baked goods that contain milk may help children get over milk allergies, according to a study - findings that may have the potential to change treatment for the disorder, which affects up to 3 percent of young children.

Allergic children given cooked milk, baked into muffins, over the course of months or years saw their symptoms disappear faster than children who simply avoided milk products, says Anna Nowak-Wegrzyn, of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, the study's co-author.

The study is "a step in the direction of ... providing a more personalized approach for treating food allergies", Nowak-Wegrzyn says.

"One approach is not right for all children with milk allergies. The majority do not need to, and should not, strictly avoid milk."

She cautions, though, that parents with children who are allergic to milk should only try the muffin treatment under a doctor's supervision.

Milk allergy is not the same as lactose intolerance, which is an inability to digest milk products. Children with allergies can react to the proteins in milk and cheese with symptoms ranging from mild itching to potentially deadly anaphylactic shock.

In the study, published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, milk-allergic children who were able to tolerate the muffins from the start were also much more likely to eventually grow out of their milk allergies, hinting at the possibility of a muffin test to distinguish transient allergies from more severe ones.

Researchers gave 88 milk-allergic children between 2 and 17 years old baked goods that included milk, and compared them to a group of 60 allergic children who followed the standard treatment, which is strict avoidance of milk products.

The idea behind the muffin experiment was that heating milk changes the shape of its proteins, lessening the chance the immune system will react.

Just less than half of children in the experimental group were able to consume dairy products, such as skim milk or yogurt, without having allergic reactions by the end of the study period.

That was compared to less than a quarter of the group who avoided milk products.

Among children who eventually outgrew their milk allergies, the ones who received the muffin therapy did so faster than the children who avoided milk - suggesting that the exposure also helped hasten the process.

The findings "run contrary to what we thought several years ago" about how childhood milk allergies are treated and will help "challenge older dogma", says Wesley Burks, chief of pediatric allergy and immunology at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina.

While he was excited by the study's results, Burks adds more research is needed to determine how this therapy will work best in clinical settings, an opinion with which Nowak-Wegrzyn agrees.

Reuters