Americans are now more concerned about their mental health than Covid, according to a recent poll from Ipsos.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which advises the Health and Human Services Department, recommended anxiety screening for children and teenagers this month. It is taking public comment through Oct. 17 on a draft recommendation that all adults be evaluated, too.

The situation is motivating lawmakers in both parties to provide an increasingly stressed, depressed and anxious populace with the appropriate care.

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Epitope testing has been shown in studies to be far more reliable in diagnosing peanut allergy than traditional skin or blood testing. Now, new research reveals that epitope testing is also good at determining if a child with peanut allergy will react to trace amounts, or if they can consume one or more peanuts before starting to react.

The epitope test is the first to provide reaction “thresholds.” These may be useful for families in deciding how careful they need to be in avoiding peanuts. This includes whether their child can safely eat foods with the “may contain” warning.

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Allergenis’ bead-based epitope assay at center of study from Mount Sinai revealing breakthrough diagnostic for peanut allergy

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As a toddler, Colton McClure never wanted to eat peanut butter. "He would always push it away," said his mom, Cheri McClure.

Then when he was a preschooler, Colton ate one Reese's peanut butter cup and was fine. After the second one, he threw up. "Something is not right," McClure said.

An allergy skin prick test produced a reaction to peanuts, tree nuts and shellfish.

The McClures, who live in Austin, immediately changed what they did. They wouldn't go to restaurants, for fear of cross-contamination. They looked at shampoos and soaps to make sure nothing Colton was allergic to was in them. They looked at processed foods for all his allergens and avoided them. They even called companies to ask what their protocols were at their manufacturing plants.

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Predictive analytics company Allergenis, which specializes in the detection and management of life-threatening food allergies, announced today a breakthrough diagnostic tool for the detection and management of peanut allergy developed with researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The bead-based epitope assay (BBEA) looks at select epitopes known to cause patient reactivity to accurately identify the cumulative tolerated dose of patients to inform clinical management of peanut allergy.

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Telehealth firm LifeMD said this week that its wholly owned subsidiary Cleared is partnering with Allergenis to offer that firm's peanut allergy diagnostic blood test. Cleared will be the exclusive telehealth provider for the commercial launch of the test. The laboratory-developed test provides patients their reactivity level to peanuts and is validated for individuals ages 4 and above.

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Traditional allergy tests are often inaccurate, leading to overdiagnosis, and don’t offer much insight into the amount of an allergen a person can safely consume.

That could mean living in fear when you don’t need to. Pennsylvania startup Allergenis is trying to change that with a new type of blood test that can help patients know how much of an allergen they can tolerate.

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Skin and blood tests to diagnose peanut allergy are known to have a high rate of false positives – as much as 50 percent. This leads to many people being wrongly diagnosed as allergic, and to a life of strict peanut avoidance.

A new test, using a technique called epitope mapping, does better – it diagnoses peanut allergy correctly over 90 percent of the time. Also helpful: the epitope test appears to determine how much peanut an allergic individual can tolerate without reacting.

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A blood test called “epitope mapping” accurately predicted peanut allergy 93 percent of the time, a recent study finds. Researchers say the new test is a significant improvement on existing tests for diagnosing peanut allergy, including skin prick tests and allergen-specific IgE blood tests. Those current tests can be unreliable in determining who will actually experience an allergic reaction to peanuts.

Beyond diagnosing peanut allergy, Sampson envisions other uses for epitope mapping. He and his colleagues are gathering data showing that epitope mapping may be able to determine roughly how much peanut someone could consume without reacting.

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