Humans didn't evolve to eat seeds, if anything, we the ones that can tolerate them are the mutations.
Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
211–220 of 249 posts
Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#212Humans didn't evolve to eat seeds, if anything, we the ones that can tolerate them are the mutations.
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Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what our allergist said. Living in Australia wife and I are both asian both eat peanuts. No peanut allergies in either families. Wife ate peanuts while pregnant but son has peanut allergy.
What's the implication here? That exposure to peanuts in utero might not help avoid peanut allergies after birth? (I'm not sure what the literature on that says) Or that there's something unusual about simply being in Australia as an infant that causes peanut sensitivity? Or that infants in Australia have less exposure to nuts?
"Or that there's something unusual about simply being in Australia as an infant that causes peanut sensitivity"
OK, but why now and not when I was a kid growing up in Australia?
We have to get to the root cause of this new problem. (Read my other posts here.)
Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the implication here? That exposure to peanuts in utero might not help avoid peanut allergies after birth? (I'm not sure what the literature on that says) Or that there's something unusual about simply being in Australia as an infant that causes peanut sensitivity? Or that infants in Australia have less exposure to nuts?
There are a lot of hayfever allergens in Australia. I have to wonder if that has something to do with it, or whether it's got something to do with how kids today don't seem to get covered in dirt.
Perhaps there's something to that. As kids we were dirty little buggers much to mother's chagrin. In the backyard throwing mud pies at each other was a commonplace activity.
And I've no known allergies.
Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep reading: > ... Early introduction of all the foods was not easy but it was safe. Among the infants who did manage to consume the recommended quantity of the allergenic foods there was a two-thirds reduction in overall food allergy. > For those who fed their infant the recommended amount of peanut there was a significant reduction in peanut allergy, 2.5% in the standard introduction group compared to no cases in…
I fail to see how your chosen quotes prove your point. How is 66% reduction not statistically significant?
It is.
OP took a sentence out of context that said that overall food allergies across the whole group were not reduced by a statistically significant amount. But the authors go on to explain why that was and explain that if you control for real participation in the test then it is significant.
Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Israel this is done naturally by feeding children Bamba, a puffed peanut snack, at a very early age. Research shows significantly decreased levels of peanut allergy. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/02/23/388450621/fe...
Yeah, we hadn't heard of this when our son was born, but the allergist mentioned it. When our daughter was born, we gave her something like this at his recommendation. The ones we got were some puffs that have a whole pile of allergens in tiny doses. Causation vs correlation and all that, and a small sample size, but our daughter doesn't have any issues with any allergies.
The economist Emily Oster wrote an excellent series of books about pregnancy anf early kid years, where she dives into details about various studies, whether they are causal, etc. It's one of the best practiacl explainations of reading research I've encountered targeted at non-academics, really well done. She has a chapter on peanut exposure allergies and i think inrecall that these early-exposure results are in fact from causal research vs just correlational research (basically there are at least two types of papers out thwre -- correlational and causal. As you might guess causal is harder to get for many reasons). Great books; she may also have published some chapters on her substack (substack came after the book I think).
I realize as I write this that you are probably saying that for your own experience you can't disentangle correlational from causation, to which I would say -- correct!
Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#217In The Netherlands it is recommended to introduce peanut and egg to babies between 4 and 6 months, to reduce the chances of food allergy. More information (in Dutch): https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/nl/service/vraag-en-antwoord/...
Didn't know that introducing these foods early in life can help build tolerance
Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> avoidance of the allergen whats the point of the allergist then?
The purpose of a system is what it does. If they make money by identifying allergies and then treating those people for those allergies, as opposed to parents giving their children 2 peanuts a week, then their livelihood is under threat. If kids were left to get dirty and put the occasional thing in their mouth, which kids have been doing since the dawn of time, then there wouldn’t be such an allergy problem
> If they make money by identifying allergies and then treating those people for those allergies, as opposed to parents giving their children 2 peanuts a week, then their livelihood is under threat.
I find that view to be overly pessimistic, and not reflective of what health care providers actually do. Practitioners of all sorts work hard to cure and prevent diseases every day. Every time a cancerous tumour is removed, it significantly reduces the chances of that person needing follow-up care. Every vaccine that is given reduces future hospital visits. Every piece of good advice to exercise and eat right keeps somebody away from the doctor, rather than turning them into a repeat customer.
Doctors aren't evil. They aren't scheming to lock patients in by offering suboptimal treatments. They provide the best care that they're able, within the limits of the knowledge and resources available to them.
Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#219Our son is very allergic to peanuts and less so to cashew, and sesame. We went through oral immunotherapy and it's been absolutely life changing. He used to need an epi pen in case of chance encounter, but now he eats 2 whole peanut m&ms every day to keep his dosage up. It's been difficult finding an allergist in Germany that's willing to accept this and move forward Obviously everyone's mileage will vary, but I'm ha…
In Israel this is done naturally by feeding children Bamba, a puffed peanut snack, at a very early age. Research shows significantly decreased levels of peanut allergy. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/02/23/388450621/fe...
Bambas are recommended in the U.S. as well, but our kid entered anaphylaxis after eating just 5 bambas his first time, at about 6 months of age. It's certainly possible to have a peanut allergy despite early exposure. Recommendation in the U.S. is now for pregnant women to eat peanuts to expose the fetus in utero, but even this doesn't always work.
Kid is desensitized now after a year of oral immunotherapy, so add us to the chorus of voices saying "It works", but it can strike early and severely despite the parents' best efforts.
Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Israel this is done naturally by feeding children Bamba, a puffed peanut snack, at a very early age. Research shows significantly decreased levels of peanut allergy. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/02/23/388450621/fe...
People mention this quite often to me because my toddler is on oral immunotherapy for peanuts, and there’s a small but important distinction here. It’s extra important when relatives start to think it’s okay to be casually leaving peanut products lying around within the toddler’s reach. (It’s not) The general consensus among allergists is that early exposure reduces the chances of developing the allergy in the first…
There are some early studies out [1] that indicate remission is possible with OIT. (For laypeople, "desensitization" ~= can tolerate some peanut exposure without a reaction, but still needs to carry an epipen and remain on the maintenance dose for life, while "remission" ~= no longer has a peanut allergy). The numbers were 71% desensitization and 21% remission for OIT vs. 2% both for a placebo. It was heavily dependent on age, with 71% of 1-year-olds, 35% of 2-year-olds, and 19% of 3-year-olds achieving remission.
Data will be scant at this time, because the full treatment takes a long time and needs to be adhered to closely. It's 30 weeks of OIT, followed by 2 years of a maintenance dose, followed by a 6-month hiatus to verify whether the maintenance dose can be stopped while still achieving remission, so data necessarily lags the start of any clinical trials by 3+ years.
[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/oral-immunothe...