In research that contradicts years of health advice, British scientists said on Monday that babies at risk of developing a childhood peanut allergy can avoid it if they are given peanuts regularly during their first 11 months.
The study, the first to show that eating certain food is an effective way of preventing allergies, showed an 80 percent reduction in the prevalence of peanut allergies among high-risk children who ate peanuts frequently from infant hood, compared to those who avoided them.
Peanut allergy tends to develop early in life and sufferers rarely grow out of it.
Allergic reactions range from difficulty in breathing, low blood pressure, swelling of the tongue, eyes or face, stomach pain, nausea and vomiting, skin rashes and blisters, inflammation, pain, and in some cases, death.
Sofia Magnuson suffers from several ‘touch’ allergies and was identified at an early age as likely to develop a peanut allergy. She was a prime candidate to take part in the study.
Her mother, Christina, said avoiding peanuts was difficult.
“For instance some of the touch allergies, right, so the grass, pollen, cats and dogs, she, her skin breaks out and she bleeds. When we’d go to a birthday party, I’d find out from the mother what kind of cake she was making, if it was chocolate cake, vanilla cake, so I’d make the same kind of cake to make sure that she didn’t feel out of place.”
Rates of food allergies have been rising in recent decades, and peanut allergy now affects between 1 and 3 percent of children in Western Europe, Australia and the United States. Peanuts cause serious allergic reactions in about 0.9 percent of the population of these regions, including about 400,000 school-age children.
Gideon Lack, who led the study at King’s College London, said the report was an important clinical development and contravened previous guidelines. He suggested new guidelines may be needed to reduce the rates of peanut allergy in children.
Lack’s study, a randomized controlled trial, enrolled 640 children aged between 4 months and 11 months from the Evelina London Children’s Hospital who were considered at high risk of developing peanut allergy because they already had either severe eczema or an egg allergy, or both.
Half the children were asked to eat foods containing peanut three or more times a week, and the other half to avoid eating peanuts until they were five years old.
In results published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Lack found that fewer than 1 percent of the children who ate peanut regularly as required had become allergic by the end of the study, while 17.3 percent in the avoidance group had developed peanut allergy.
Lack said that we shouldn’t avoid giving peanuts to most young children.
“In children who display early symptoms of allergies such as eggs or milk or other food allergies, we ought to skin prick test them and if the skin test is normal and reassuring we ask them to take peanut products regularly; if the skin test is positive the first dose should be given under supervision,” said Lack.
“Deliberate avoidance of peanut in the first year of life is consequently brought into question as a strategy to prevent allergy,” Lack’s team wrote in the study.
For Sofia, taking part in the study has improved her life – she hasn’t developed a peanut allergy.
Lack will now look at other allergenic food such as egg, milk, fish and sesame, working on the idea that exposure to these foods early in life allows the body to build up a tolerance.
(Reuters)