ACAAI: Parents, Patients Offer Theories on Causes/Origins of Food Allergies

MONDAY, Nov. 13, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Parents and adult patients with food allergy (FA) believe that factors such as diet, genetics, family history, and infection are associated with FA development, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, held from Nov. 9 to 13 in Anaheim, California.

Rachelle Liu, from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues administered a cross-sectional food allergy survey to patients and caregivers, which collected nationally representative data for 38,408 children and 40,443 adults.

The researchers found that the measures most perceived to be associated with development of FA were eating too much of the allergenic food, genetics and family history, antibiotic use, and eating too little of the allergenic food in adults and children with physician-confirmed FA (18.6, 16.3, 12.5, and 10.2 percent, respectively). Respondents associated developing FA with a viral infection in populations aged 0 to 10 years and 11 to 17 years (23.8 and 25.6 percent, respectively).

"Allergists and other health care professionals can help get the word out to parents of infants and others that it's preventative to introduce certain allergenic foods early in life," senior author Ruchi Gupta, M.D., M.P.H., also from Northwestern University in Chicago, said in a statement. "For new-onset adult allergies, understanding potential triggers that may be involved with the development of an allergy is critical."

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