Desensitization
The major objective of our meta-analysis was to determine the efficacy
of OIT for IMCMA. All 11 studies described the efficacy of OIT, a total
of 469 patients were quantitatively analyzed (242 OIT, 227 control). Our
meta-analysis showed that 176 patients (72.7%) of the patients
receiving OIT were able to completely desensitized compared to 49
(21.6%) of the control group, with a pooled RR of 7.35 (95%CI 2.82,
19.13; p<0.0001; Figure 3A) . After weeding out patients
younger than 3-years-old, there was no heterogeneity between the rest
studies. So we did a subgroup analysis for these patients over
3-years-old, the result showed that 74 (58.7%) patients in the OIT
group achieved desensitization, while no one in the control group, with
a pooled RR of 18.05(95% CI 6.48, 50.26; p<0.00001; Figure
3B). Because of obvious publication bias, we also performed a
sensitivity analysis to ensure that any included study would not affect
the overall results (Table 2). In addition, there were five studies that
described the effect of OIT on partial desensitization. The definition
of partial desensitization is not the same between studies. The analysis
showed that the OIT group had a higher rate of partial desensitization
than the control group (RR 9.94, 95% CI 2.8, 34.37; p=0.0003; Figure
3C).