Brush Away Your Sniffles With New Allergy-Fighting Toothpaste

For people with severe allergies, relief can cost a lot of time. Doctors can administer allergy shots, but you need them regularly, as often as multiple times a week. If you don’t complete the proper regimen, which can last for years, the treatment won’t be effective. Popular Science reports that there’s a new method for administering long-term allergy medicine that could prove a whole lot more convenient for patients, and it doesn’t involve any needles. It’s toothpaste.

Allerdent is a specially formulated toothpaste that can be customized to treat particular allergies. Typical allergy shots contain very small amounts of the allergen you’re trying to desensitize your body to—much like a vaccine contains the microbe of the disease it’s designed to inoculate you against. With Allerdent, instead of putting that allergen extract in a shot, the doctor mixes it into a toothpaste base. Patients can take that toothpaste home and use it daily, rather than coming in for a weekly allergy shot.

It’s not the first mouth-based allergy medicine. There are also under-the-tongue allergy drops that are widely used in Europe, but they can irritate the stomach and throat if you accidentally swallow them. But since the mucus membrane of the mouth has a high immune response (to protect against all the weird stuff you put in your mouth every day), it’s a great place to administer allergy medicine. Allergy toothpaste similarly allows you to put the medicine where it’s most effective, but it doesn't involve holding a squirt of oil in your mouth, and it doesn't have any gastrointestinal side effects.

The toothpaste comes with a pre-measured pump so that you get exactly the amount of medicine you need (no need to eyeball what the size of a pea is) and it can remain effective with up to 10 allergen extracts, so you could treat multiple allergies at one time. It could be especially effective to treat kids, since they're more likely to have trouble with shots or under-the-tongue drops. And, because it's something you can do at home, patients are more likely to stick to the regimen.

Allerdent isn’t easy to obtain at the moment. Your doctor has to order it, and because the FDA hasn’t approved allergen extracts in toothpaste (they’re only approved in shot form), your insurance company might not pay for it. As research into Allerdent and other oral allergy medicines progresses, though, the product might become easier to access.