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New Guidelines Say Exposing Infants To Peanuts Could Prevent Allergies
By
Nell Casey
Published Jan 5, 2017
Modified Jan 5, 2017
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By
Nell Casey
Published Jan 5, 2017
Modified Jan 5, 2017
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To prevent serious peanut allergies, feed your baby peanuts. Seems counterintuitive, perhaps, but those are the new guidelines released by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases today, which is hoping to curb the growing population of individuals who have incurable and potentially deadly allergies to peanuts.
A study funded by NIAID showed that early exposure to peanuts lessened a child's likelihood of developing a peanut allergy. Six hundred infants were divided into two groups; half were exposed to peanuts, the others were not. When the children reached age five, only 2% of the children exposed to peanuts in infancy developed allergies, while 14% of those who avoided peanuts had developed allergies.
Children in the high risk category—mainly those born with severe eczema, an egg allergy or both—also showed a dramatic reduction in peanut allergies. Only 11% of children in this category who ate peanut products in infancy developed an allergy, versus 35% of those who were not fed any peanut products as infants.
"The LEAP study clearly showed that introduction of peanut early in life significantly lowered the risk of developing peanut allergy by age 5. The magnitude of the benefit and the scientific strength of the study raised the need to operationalize these findings by developing clinical recommendations focused on peanut allergy prevention," Daniel Rotrosen, M.D., director of NIAID’s Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation said in a press release.
It's now recommended that parents begin exposing their children to peanut products after the child has begun eating other solid foods. Children born without eczema or an allergy to eggs can begin eating peanut products—like peanut puffs or watered down peanut butter—as early as four to six months; the same is true for moderate risk children who may have mild cases of eczema.
Children at high risk should only be exposed to peanut products in a doctor's office and infants shouldn't be given whole peanuts at all because of choking risk.
"If 20 years ago, we knew what we knew now, many children of the past 15-20 years may not have gone on to develop peanut allergy," says Dr. Hugh Sampson, Director of the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai. "Unfortunately, it took the LEAP trial [to give] us the proof that the early introduction was the best way to go."
An estimated 15 million people in the United States alone suffer from some kind of food allergy and those allergies tend to lead to other health complications such as asthma, gastrointestinal diseases and dermatitis. These new guidelines hope to lessen that number.
"This won't outright prevent every single case of peanut allergy—there will still be some cases—but the number could be significantly reduced by tens of thousands," Dr. Greenhawt, chairman of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology’s food allergy committee, explained to the Times. "In the best case scenario, every allergist across the U.S. could be seeing fewer cases of peanut allergy—and that's a good problem to have."
Now that peanuts are on their way to redemption, next on the menu: dirt.
Tagged
allergies
food allergies
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
National Institutes of Health
NIAID
peanut allergies
Nell Casey
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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