Feeding babies peanuts cuts allergy risk

The research suggests that allowing children to get used to nuts early prevents an allergic reaction.

Researchers at King's College London said the early introduction of peanut to the diets of infants dramatically reduces the risk of allergy.

Researchers are, however, advising parents to adhere to the existing official advice for now, saying that the study was carried out under the guidance of allergy professionals.

In 2015, a study claimed early exposure to peanut products could cut the risk of allergy by 80%.

Research a year ago showed that exposing infants to bits of peanut butter - rather than keeping peanuts away from them - offered initial protection for most children at high risk of developing an allergy.

Scientists found that weekly consumption of the equivalent of approximately one and a half teaspoons of peanut butter and one small boiled egg would lead to the prevention of an allergy to those food substances.

That kind of thinking has led to a number of studies, including the Learning About Peanuts (LEAP) trial published a year ago.

By the time they were five, less than 1 per cent of the children who had regularly eaten peanuts throughout the study were allergic to them, compared with 17.5 per cent of the rest. During the period of the study, the researchers found out that by the age of 5, peanut allergies were less common in those children who started eating peanut products before the age of 1 than those children who were asked not to eat peanut-related products. And with the ever increasing rates of food allergies among children-according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, food allergies in children have increased 50 percent between 1997 and 2011-it's reasonable for parents to want information on whether the tactic is useful for other foods as well.

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New research may help protect future generations of children from potentially life-threatening peanut allergies.

A new study shows that feeding peanuts to babies and young children may help protect them from peanut allergies later.

Peanut allergy develops early in life, is rarely out-grown and there is now no cure.

- The effects of introducing allergenic foods to breast-fed infants.

To determine whether patients who had consumed peanut would remain protected against peanut allergy after an interruption of peanut consumption for 12 months, the researchers enrolled 550 of the eligible patients - regardless of previous inclusion in "peanut-consumption" or "peanut-avoidance" cohorts - from the primary trial to actively avoid peanut protein for 12 months.

"The LEAP-ON findings exceeded our expectations and demonstrated that the early consumption of peanuts provided stable and sustained protection against the development of peanut allergy in children at greatest risk for this allergy", Dr. Lack pointed out. Food allergies are becoming a common problem in children in several nations, with up to 8% of children below the age of three years affected by them.

The New England Journal of Medicine published both new studies online Friday, coinciding with their presentation at a medical meeting in Los Angeles. Compliance with peanut avoidance was assessed by a validated questionnaire and was confirmed by quantifying peanut protein in dust samples collected from participants' beds.

Still, Wong said the new studies confirm that the old approach to preventing food allergies - avoiding certain foods early in life - is probably obsolete.