NY Times Turning what was once
conventional wisdom on its head, a new study suggests that many, if not
most peanut allergies can be prevented by feeding young children food
containing peanuts beginning in infancy, rather than avoiding such
foods.
About 2 percent of
American children are allergic to peanuts, a figure that has more than
quadrupled since 1997 for reasons that are not entirely clear. There
have also been big increases in other Western countries. For some
people, even traces of peanuts can be life-threatening.
An editorial published Monday in The New England Journal of Medicine,
along with the study, called the results “so compelling” and the rise
of peanut allergies “so alarming” that guidelines for how to feed
infants at risk of peanut allergies should be revised soon.
The study “clearly
indicates that the early introduction of peanut dramatically decreases
the risk of development of peanut allergy,” said the editorial, by Dr.
Rebecca S. Gruchalla of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center and Dr. Hugh A. Sampson of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount
Sinai in New York City. It also “makes it clear that we can do something
now to reverse the increasing prevalence of peanut allergy.” [...]
Dr. Gideon Lack, a
professor of pediatric allergy at King’s College London and the leader
of the study, said the common practice of withholding peanuts from
babies “could have been in part responsible for the rise in peanut
allergies we have seen.” [...]
So Dr. Lack and colleagues conducted a survey,
published in 2008, that found the rate of peanut allergy in Israeli
children was only about one-tenth that of Jewish children in Britain.
The best explanation, they concluded, was that Israeli infants consumed
high amount of peanut protein in the first year of life while parents in
Britain avoided giving such foods. [...]
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