Lene Hoj, MD, Copenhagen, Denmark
Presented at 52nd annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology; March 15-20, 1996, New Orleans, Published – Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Vol. 97, No. 1, Part 3, January 1996.
The purpose of this study was to define the potential usefulness of the Alcat Test in evaluating intolerance to food additives, 92 patients, 52 female and 40 male median age 34 years (range: 3-80) suffering from alimentary intolerance were previously investigated by the Alcat Test for foods and brought into remission on individual diets also eliminating food additives. The methods were in-vitro computer-based cellular Alcat Test against 10 common food preservatives (FA) and 10 colourants (FC). The DBPC challenges with opaque capsules (ALK, DK) containing the additives were applied as standard according to this design: 76 challenges were performed in 26 patients randomly selected among the Alcat Test patients, and each patient was challenged with 1 reactive antigen, 1 non-reactive antigen, and 1 placebo. The results are given in the table. (In-vitro 2 patients were not reacting to any antigen.
Efficiency: 0,96. Conclusively, the Alcat Test seems to provide a high efficiency in detecting food additive intolerance with few-false positives and it deserves further studies on larger material.