Specific immunotherapy by the sublingual route for respiratory allergy

Specific immunotherapy is the only treatment able to act on the causes and not only on the symptoms of respiratory allergy. Sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) was introduced as an option to subcutaneous immunotherapy (SCIT), the clinical effectiveness of which is partly counterbalanced by the issue of adverse systemic reactions, which occur at a frequency of about 0.2% of injections and 2-5% of the patients and may also be life-threatening. A large number of trials, globally evaluated by several meta-analyses, demonstrated that SLIT is an effective and safe treatment for allergic rhinitis and allergic asthma, severe reactions being extremely rare. The application of SLIT is favored by a good compliance, higher than that reported for SCIT, in which the injections are a major factor for noncompliance because of inconvenience, and by its cost-effectiveness. In fact, a number of studies showed that SLIT may be very beneficial to the healthcare system, especially when its effectiveness persists after treatment withdrawal because of the induced immunologic changes. © 2010 Incorvaia et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.