Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Patient Stories
“Doing Phenomenally Well”
Kaitlyn Crutchlow and dad Ross visit Anna Nowak-Wegrzyn, MD.
After birth, Kaitlyn Crutchlow seemed headed down the same high-risk road as her two brothers, who counted 30 allergies between them. At 4 weeks, she already had body-wide eczema and tested positive for milk and egg allergies. And blood and skin tests at the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai also showed a negative reaction to peanut, which prompted her physician, Anna Nowak-Wegrzyn, MD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Allergy and Immunology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, to start the infant at 6 months on a slurry of peanut butter and hot water through an eye dropper. “The idea of giving a potentially highly allergic food to an infant unable to verbalize was kind of nerve-racking,” admits Kaitlyn’s mother, Jenny Crutchlow.
Now, at 16 months of age, Kaitlyn is “doing phenomenally well,” reports her mom. A small rash around her mouth and some hives on the torso caused concern initially, but they disappeared after a month and now she consumes peanut-containing foods every day without any reaction. And that has given Ms. Crutchlow the luxury to think about a world free of the constant threat of allergic reactions. “Imagine your child being able to go to birthday parties without worrying about her having a piece of cake,” she says, “or eating at a restaurant without fear that anaphylaxis—a potentially fatal reaction to allergy—is around the corner.”
“Hopeful and Relieved”
Chia Kuo with son Ander
“I think many parents of kids with allergies have this level of guilt that they could have done something differently,” says Chia Kuo, whose 4-year-old twin daughters have food allergies, one of whom has a severe allergy to peanut. So, when her son, Ander, was born, Ms. Kuo was determined to give him an advantage her daughters did not have. She brought him to the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute for testing at 4 months and, soon after, under physician supervision, began introducing him to peanut-containing food as part of a risk-reduction regimen.
Mount Sinai’s Dr. Nowak-Wegrzyn has treated Ander’s older sisters for nearly five years. Dr. Nowak-Wegrzyn started Ander on small doses of diluted peanut butter even though his allergies were considered mild. After passing this initial “food challenge” at the Jaffe Institute, Ander was cleared for increasing amounts of the mixture at home, three to four times a week.
The prognosis for Ander at 10 months is encouraging. The eczema he has had since birth has remained stable, and Ms. Kuo has been advised her son’s chances of developing a peanut allergy are slim. “I’m hopeful and relieved,” she says. “If not for the treatment, there’s a good chance Ander may have wound up with severe allergies, just as one of my daughters did.”
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Research
Scott H. Sicherer, MD, left, and Hugh A. Sampson, MD
In a significant departure from past medical practice, new guidelines from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) call on parents to introduce peanut containing foods to infants as young as 4 to 6 months as a way to prevent potentially life-threatening peanut allergy. The guidelines, issued in January, were developed by an expert national panel that included two allergist-immunologists from the renowned Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
“About 4 million babies are born each year in the United States, and we know that two to two-and-a-half percent will develop peanut allergy,” says Hugh A. Sampson, MD, Director of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute and the Kurt Hirschhorn Professor of Pediatrics. “We are not going to eradicate peanut allergy, but our goal with the new guidelines is to get the number of affected children down to about one percent.” Dr. Sampson was a member of the NIAID panel along with Scott H. Sicherer, MD, the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Pediatrics and Chief of the Division of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology.
Peanut allergy has grown alarmingly in recent years. According to a Mount Sinai study, allergy from peanut affected 1 in 250 children in the United States in 1997. By 2002, the incidence had jumped to 1 in 125 children, and to 1 in 70 children by 2008. The advocacy group Food Allergy Research and Education reports that food allergies result in 200,000 emergency room visits each year. “Peanut allergy tends to be severe, is potentially fatal, and is usually lifelong,” says Dr. Sicherer, “so having a strategy to prevent it, particularly one that is inexpensive to implement, offers tremendous benefits.”
For decades, allergists recommended that high-risk infants avoid exposure to peanuts through the first three years, but a landmark international allergy study, first published in 2015, proved to be a game-changer, showing that early introduction to peanut-containing food among allergy-prone infants reduced their chance of developing a peanut allergy by up to 80 percent.
The new guidelines, which were based largely on these findings, define which infants are at high, moderate, and low risk for developing peanut allergy and recommend to allergists and caregivers how to proceed with the introduction of peanut-containing food based upon risk and age. The guidelines also caution parents not to give whole peanuts to infants, and they offer peanut-containing food suggestions and methods to introduce these foods. To learn more about the guidelines, visit niaid.nih.gov.
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Research
In Huffington Post’s new video series “Experimenters,” data scientist Eric Schadt, PhD, founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, discusses his mission to revolutionize health care.
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Insights
As President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans contemplate whether to replace, overhaul or modify the Affordable Care Act, it is essential that our leaders exercise caution as they consider the implications of changes to the Medicaid program.
Read the article in Forbes
Updated on Jul 15, 2025 | Community, Featured
From left: Gary C. Butts, MD; Robert A. Levinson, husband of the late Patricia S. Levinson; and Kenneth L. Davis, MD
More than 100 friends and members of the Mount Sinai Health System paid tribute to the late Patricia S. Levinson at a ceremony in November, when Mount Sinai’s Center for Multicultural and Community Affairs (CMCA) was renamed in her honor.
Mrs. Levinson, a Mount Sinai Trustee for 34 years, “was CMCA’s most passionate advocate,” said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, who spoke at the event. “Her advice, counsel, and generosity were legendary, and she was a tremendous ally and resource for the Health System.”
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Research
The sarcophagus of a 3,500-year-old mummy was opened at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
At the intersection of medicine, archaeology, and the plot of an Indiana Jones movie lies a course of study pursued by Jagat Narula, MD, PhD, MACC.
Dr. Narula’s highly eminent day jobs include serving as the Chief of Cardiology at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai West; Director of Cardiovascular Imaging for the Mount Sinai Health System; Philip J. and Harriet L. Goodhart Professor of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; and Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging. But for more than six years, he has also traveled the world studying mummies with the Horus Group, named for the Egyptian god of the sky and the hunt. The multidisciplinary research group includes cardiologists, radiologists, pathologists, geneticists, basic scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. “We call ourselves the paleocardiologists,” Dr. Narula says, “just talking about the old or ancient stuff.” Their studies, which have been published in journals like The Lancet and Global Heart, began with a simple question: Is heart disease—atherosclerosis, or the hardening and narrowing of the arteries—a disease of the modern age and industrialization?
The group has now studied more than 100 Egyptian mummies in Cairo and Berlin using a CT scanner and has found that a third of them showed vascular disease up to 3,500 years ago. The hardening of the arteries was identified by the calcium that had deposited in their arteries. Now that kind of throws you off, as to why mankind suffered from heart disease so long ago,” Dr. Narula says. “But then you start finding out about their lifestyles. These mummies were from the elite of Egypt. These are the people who used to be carried on palanquins; there was no exercise for them.” They consumed meat frequently and feasted on bird e.gs; agriculture was well developed, and food was available all day, every day. In essence, the Egyptian elite lived like modern humans—though riding in sedan chairs, not SUVs—and their cardiovascular health paid the toll.
Jagat Narula, MD, PhD, MACC
Next the group studied the mummies of 70 Peruvians from the Andes foothills who were buried 1,000 years ago and had been naturally preserved. “You are now looking at folks who are not sedentary like the Egyptians; 50 percent of them are vegetarians, and 50 percent of them consume leaner meat, such as alpaca.” In this hardy population, the team still found that one-fifth had atherosclerosis. At first, Dr. Narula says, the researchers wondered, “Does that mean we are doomed to have this disease?” But they noticed mummies with black lungs that resulted from long exposure to the smoke of cooking fires. The team made similar observations in five sets of mummified remains in the Aleutian Islands. People in that society kayaked, hunted, and ate fish and meat, but they lived in subterranean households that were warmed with fires and had minimal ventilation through the ceiling, so they were exposed to “indoor pollution.” He maintains that atherosclerosis, today or thousands of years ago, is a result of risk factors.
In their next project, in March, the Horus Group will study mummified remains in Torino, Italy. “During the day we work, and in the evenings and mornings we sit down and discuss the data,” Dr. Narula says. “It’s a very congenial group of about 15 people.” But the mission is a serious one. Dr. Narula sees the study of mummies as a “very convincing” way to promote global cardiovascular wellness and the awareness of risk factors, including cholesterol, smoking, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and stress. “Mummy research shows us that the risk factors remain the basis for heart disease,” Dr. Narula says. But heart disease is not inevitable: “Prevention or taking care of risk factors should take care of disease.”
