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Peanut exposure prevents allergy

Giving infants protein cuts risk
In the past 13 years, the prevalence of peanut allergy has quadrupled in the U.S., from 0.4 percent in 1997 to 2 percent in 2010.

Peanut allergy, an occasionally life-threatening condition that has prompted changes in food consumption rules everywhere from pre-schools to airlines, can be sharply reduced by feeding peanut protein to infants at risk for the condition, researchers reported in a landmark study.

If follow-up research shows the approach is safe, the findings could have implications for other potentially dangerous childhood allergies, such as those involving milk and eggs, and might help slow the rapid spread of peanut allergies throughout the western world, experts said.

“This is really quite an important study,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, which partly funded the research. “We have been frustrated in what to do about it, and most of the tendency has been, since it’s such a scary phenomenon ... that parents and even pediatricians have taken the avoidance approach – keep them away from peanuts.”

But the study contends that feeding small amounts of peanut protein to infants between the ages of 4 and 11 months who are at risk for peanut allergies sharply reduced the incidence of the condition at age 5, when they were compared with a group of children who did not consume peanut protein.

Among the larger of two groups of children in the study, for example, 13.7 percent of those who avoided peanut protein developed the allergy while just 1.9 percent of those who consumed it did.

The research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. An accompanying editorial described the research as a “landmark study,” called for quick issuance of new guidelines on peanut consumption by children and recommended that some infants between the ages of four and eight months who are at risk for the allergy be started on small amounts of peanut protein.

One of the lead researchers, Gideon Lack, head of the Department of Pediatric Allergy at King’s College London, agreed.

“I believe that the findings are robust enough to tell us that if a child is at risk for peanut allergy ... that child should immediately, as soon as they develop the first signs, have a skin prick test” for the allergy, he said. If the test is negative, the child “should be encouraged to eat peanuts regularly.”

If the skin test is positive, the same program could be followed under the supervision of a pediatrician, he said.

For some people who are allergic to them, peanuts can cause a severe, sometimes rapid whole-body reaction called anaphylaxis that includes constriction of the airways that can be life-threatening. Such people must be extremely careful about consuming even trace amounts of peanuts and may have to carry injectable epinephrine with them to counter the effects of a reaction.

Milder symptoms of the allergy can include hives or other types of skin rash, digestive problems and shortness of breath or wheezing.

According to the editorial, the prevalence of peanut allergy has quadrupled in the United States in the past 13 years, from 0.4 percent in 1997 to 2 percent in 2010.

Separately, a study presented at a recent conference showed that wearing a skin patch containing 50 to 250 micrograms of peanut protein appeared to protect people with peanut allergies against the dangerous reactions of the condition.



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