Peanut allergies have plunged 43% in 8 years. Here’s how it was accomplished

Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) compared peanut and food allergies before pediatric guidelines about feeding changed in 2017 and after, and found that infants and toddlers are being diagnosed with far fewer food allergies now. Comparing pre-guideline rates with the post-2017 period, diagnoses of any food allergy were about 36 percent lower — driven largely by a roughly 43 percent drop in peanut allergy.

It represents “prevention of a potentially deadly, life-changing diagnosis,” [said] Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center ….

For years, well-meaning medical advice told parents that the way to protect children from developing food allergies was to delay the introduction of allergenic foods.

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But that reasoning began to unravel in 2015 with the LEAP trial, a gold-standard randomized trial that found that high-risk babies who started peanuts early and kept eating it through childhood had about an 80 percent lower risk of developing a peanut allergy by age 5, compared to those kept off the nuts.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here