Study: Giving peanuts to at-risk babies may prevent allergy
LONDON — In research that contradicts years of health advice, scientists said on Monday that babies at risk of developing a childhood peanut allergy might avoid it if they are given peanuts regularly during their first 11 months.
The study, the first to show that eating certain foods is an effective way of preventing allergy, showed an 80 percent reduction in the prevalence of peanut allergies among high-risk children who ate peanuts frequently from infanthood, compared to those who avoided them.
“This is an important clinical development and contravenes previous guidelines,” said Gideon Lack, who led the study at King’s College London.
“New guidelines may be needed to reduce the rate of peanut allergy in our children.”
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.
Allergy to peanuts tends to develop early in life and sufferers rarely grow out of it.
Allergic reactions can included difficulty 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.
Lack’s study, a randomized controlled trial, enrolled 640 children ages 4 months to 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 fed foods containing peanut three or more times a week, and the other half avoided eating peanuts until they were 5 years old.
As reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, 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.
“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.
In an editorial, Dr. Rebecca S. Gruchalla and Dr. Hugh A. Sampson ask whether doctors should now advise parents to introduce peanuts to all babies before they reach 11 months of age.
Unfortunately, they warn, there’s no simple response and a lot of unanswered questions. For example, “Do infants need to ingest 2 grams of peanut protein (approximately eight peanuts) three times a week on a regular basis for five years, or will it suffice to consume lesser amounts on a more intermittent basis for a shorter period of time? If regular peanut consumption is discontinued for a prolonged period, will tolerance persist?”
“These questions must be addressed,” they write, “but we believe that because the results of this trial are so compelling, and the problem of the increasing prevalence of peanut allergy so alarming, new guidelines should be forthcoming very soon.”
