In one, the rate of peanut allergies was about 10 times lower for children who ate peanuts from an early age, compared to kids whose parents avoided giving their infants peanuts.
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New guidelines from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), published Thursday, call for early introduction of peanut-containing foods to infants to prevent the development of peanut allergy. But newer research shows there are benefits to earlier introduction.
“Allergy tests can notoriously be positive when the food can be consumed anyway”. Instead, parents could use age-appropriate foods, such as smooth peanut butter, the guidelines said.
The 2015 study prompted USA allergy and pediatric experts to develop the new guidelines.
Dr. Amal Assa’ad, professor of pediatrics in the Allergy Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, helped to write the recommendations released by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. For these children, parents should introduce peanut-containing foods around 6 months of age, and parents do not need to seek evaluation from a doctor beforehand, the guidelines said. People living with peanut allergy, and their caregivers, must be vigilant about the foods they eat and the environments they enter to avoid allergic reactions, which can be severe and even life-threatening.
The number of children with nut allergies has quadrupled in the past 13 years, and peanut allergies affect an estimated 2 percent of them, the Washington Post reports.
Anthony S. Fauci, NIAID director, said in an interview that the new thinking on peanut exposure grew out of observations of Israeli children in Israel versus Israeli children in Britain. Per the new guidelines, infants fall into three categories based on their allergy risk.
“In the meantime, parents should follow our existing guidelines: we recommend babies are breastfed exclusively for around the first six months, after which a wide range of solid foods should be introduced alongside continued breastfeeding or infant formula feeding”.
The new guidelines go further by promoting early ingestion for the highest risk infants.
To assuage potential safety concerns, experts advise that those babies at highest risk for a deadly allergy should be tested at the office of a specialist.
The recommendations provide guidance about how to safely introduce young children to peanuts from an early age. The same recommendation suggested some women whose infants were considered at risk of developing an allergy should avoid eating peanuts if they were breastfeeding, and that some women should even avoid peanuts during pregnancy.
The specialist can watch the infant to make sure nothing risky happens when they get a little dose of peanut.
A five-month-old baby being fed with a spoon. For these little ones, the experts recommend they start trying peanut-containing foods around four to six months of age-after solid foods are introduced.
Early peanut introduction was shown to dramatically reduce the risk for allergic sensitization in high-risk infants in the landmark LEAP trial. Then Stevenson found an allergy specialist who insisted that was the wrong advice – and offered baby Estelle a taste test of peanut butter in his office when she was 7 months old.
“We would encourage everybody to get on board with this”, Greenhawt said. Six hundred infants were divided into two groups; half were exposed to peanuts, the others were not.
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The guidelines are simultaneously being published in Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the ACAAI’s scientific publication, and several other scientific journals.
