More than one-quarter of children in the USA with a history of food allergies have outgrown their sensitivities and can tolerate the foods that once made them sick, a new analysis shows.
Yet black children, kids with multiple allergies and those with histories of severe reactions are less likely than other children to recover. Children with allergies to nuts or fish don't fare as well as those with allergies to eggs, milk, soy and wheat. And children with those easier-to-overcome allergies don't outgrow them as quickly as observed in earlier generations of children, says Ruchi Gupta, associate professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Doctors used to see children growing out of milk allergies in preschool years. But now "we see kids really holding on to milk allergies," sometimes into teen years, says Gupta, who presented the unpublished data at a meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology last week in Anaheim, Calif. The reasons for that shift -- and the recent increases in child food allergies -- are unknown, she says.
Gupta and her colleagues collected data on 40,000 children and teens nationwide to find 4,433 with current or former food allergies. As the researchers have reported before, about 8% of children in the USA have food allergies.
The new report says an additional 3% had food allergies in the past but did not have them at the time of the survey. For example, 41% of milk allergies, 40% of egg allergies, 16% of peanut allergies and 13% of shellfish allergies had been outgrown. The rates get higher as children grow older. So 55% of children older than 10 with a history of egg allergy no longer had the problem, Gupta says.
"Most kids develop tolerance by age 10, but tolerance can develop at any age," she says. "There's always hope."
The tolerance rates found in the study are in line with what allergists see in their offices and what other research has shown, says Scott Sicherer, professor of pediatrics at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
Many children outgrow their allergies, "but they are slower at outgrowing them than in the past," he says.
For children who remain allergic, the standard treatment is avoiding the food that could make them break out in hives, swell up, wheeze, get an upset stomach or suffer a life-threatening anaphylactic reaction.
Still, doctors are trying new ways to help more children safely tolerate foods. One method is oral immunotherapy, in which children are given very small, repeated doses of peanut, egg or milk in a doctor's office to see if they can build up tolerance over time. The approach is showing promise but remains experimental and should never be tried at home, Sicherer says.
In another approach, doctors are letting some allergic children try muffins, waffles, cakes or other baked products that contain milk or eggs -- which are less likely to trigger reactions after thorough heating. Several studies have shown many allergic kids can tolerate the foods. And it's possible that those who keep eating the baked foods might overcome their allergies faster, Sicherer says.
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