Feeding children peanut products regularly from infancy to age five years reduced the rate of peanut allergy in adolescence by 71%, even when the children ate or avoided peanut products as desired for many years. These new findings, from a study sponsored and co-funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), provide conclusive evidence that achieving long-term prevention of peanut allergy is possible through early allergen consumption. The results were published today in the journal NEJM Evidence .
Study: Follow-up to Adolescence after Early Peanut Introduction for Allergy Prevention . Image Credit: 2YouStockPhoto / Shutterstock "Today's findings should reinforce parents' and caregivers' confidence that feeding their young children peanut products beginning in infancy according to established guidelines can provide lasting protection from peanut allergy," said NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo, M.D.
, M.P.H.
"If widely implemented, this safe, simple strategy could prevent tens of thousands of cases of peanut allergy among the 3.6 million children born in the United States each year." The new research findings come from the LEAP-Trio study, which builds on the seminal results of the Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) clinical trial and the subsequent LEAP-On study , both sponsored and co-funded by NIAID.
During the LEAP trial, half of the participants regularly consumed peanut products from infancy until age fiv.
