Peanut allergies have dropped significantly in children within only a few years of the National Institutes of Health updating its guidance to say that exposing infants to peanuts can decrease allergy risk.
The guidance, given in 2021, was a reversal of decades of official recommendations that parents avoid exposing infants to peanuts. Research in recent years has suggested that giving infants foods with allergen risks can protect them against developing allergies later in life.
A new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics found that peanut allergy rates in children under three dropped by 43% between 2015 and 2020, with overall food allergies in young children dropping by 36% during that time.
Roughly 8% of children and nearly 11% of adults in the United States have a food allergy, in which the immune system reacts abnormally to a component in food, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Although it was long recommended to avoid infant exposure to allergens, that opinion began to change following a landmark clinical trial in 2015 that found feeding peanuts to infants could cut their chances of developing an allergy later in life by 80%.
In 2017, NIAID formally adopted the early-introduction approach, and in 2021, the institution set a national guideline of introducing allergens between four and six months of age.
The new study, conducted by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pediatric allergist Dr. David Hill, followed 125,000 children from nearly 50 pediatric practices up until the age of three, when roughly two thirds of children have an official allergy diagnosis.
Hill and his colleagues reported that the rate of allergy reduction in the study corresponds to about 57,000 fewer children with food allergies since the adoption of the NIAID recommendations on early introduction to allergens.
“I can actually come to you today and say there are less kids with food allergy today than there would have been if we hadn’t implemented this public health effort,” Hill told CBS News.
Critics of the new study contend that it is not definitive proof of the effectiveness of the recommendation since the study did not examine what infants ate. An alternative hypothesis for the decline in allergies could be the decline in eczema rates, since both allergies and eczema are autoimmune conditions.
Parents and pediatricians have been slow to implement the guidance on early exposure to allergens. A 2021 survey found that only 17% of caregivers reported giving their infant peanuts before they were seven months old.
Among clinicians, a report published this year by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that pediatricians recommended early peanut introduction to only 10% of high-risk infants, such as those with eczema, and to only 35% of lower-risk infants.
RFK JR. MAHA FOOD REGULATIONS HAVE BIPARTISAN APPEAL, NEW POLL FINDS
Addressing the rise in food allergies has been a part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
The White House’s MAHA Strategy report on children’s health published in September included a directive for the Food and Drug Administration to “develop guidance on diagnostics and treatments for food allergies” as well as require food labeling disclosures of allergens.
