OTHER FINDINGS
• Food and respiratory allergies are more common in higher-income families than the poor.
• Eczema and skin allergies are most common among the poor.
• More black children have skin problems, 17 percent, compared to 12 percent of white children and about 10 percent of Hispanic children.
Parents are reporting more skin and food allergies in their children, a big government survey found.
Experts aren’t sure what’s behind the increase. Could it be that children are growing up in households so clean it leaves them more sensitive to things that can trigger allergies? Or are mom and dad paying closer attention to rashes and reactions, and more likely to call it an allergy?
“We don’t really have the answer,” said Dr. Lara Akinbami of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the senior author of the new report released Thursday.
The CDC survey suggests that about 1 in 20 U.S. children have food allergies. That’s a 50 percent increase from the late 1990s. For eczema and other skin allergies, it’s 1 in 8 children, an increase of 69 percent. It found no increase, however, in hay fever or other respiratory allergies.
Already familiar with the trend in food allergies are school nurses, who have grown busier with allergy-related duties, like banishing peanuts at school parties or stocking emergency allergy medicine.
Sally Schoessler started as school nurse in 1992 in New York state, and didn’t encounter a child with a food allergy for a few years. By the time she left school nursing in 2005, however, “there were children in the majority of classrooms” with the disorder, said Schoessler, who now works at the National Association of School Nurses in Silver Spring, Md.
Food allergies tend to be most feared; severe cases can cause anaphylactic shock or even death from eating, say, a peanut. But many food allergies are milder and something children grow out of. Skin conditions like eczema, too, can be mild and temporary.
It’s been difficult getting exact numbers for children’s allergies, and the new report isn’t precise. It uses annual surveys of thousands of adults interviewed in person. The report compares answers from 1997-1999 to those from 2009-2011.
Parents were asked if, in the previous year, their child had any kind of food or digestive allergy, any eczema or skin allergy, or any kind of respiratory allergy like hay fever.
The researchers did not ask if a doctor had made the diagnosis, so some parents might have been stating a personal opinion, and not necessarily a correct one.
“We see a lot of kids in clinic that really aren’t” allergic to the foods their parents worry about, said Dr. Morton Galina, a pediatric allergist at Atlanta’s Emory School of Medicine.
For example, hives are sometimes blamed on a certain food when a virus is the actual cause, he said.
But experts also said they believe there is a real — and unexplained — increase going on, too.
One of the more popular theories is “the hygiene hypothesis,” which says that exposure to germs and parasites in early childhood somehow prevents the body from developing certain allergies. The hypothesis has been bolstered by a range of laboratory and observational studies, including some that have found lower rates of eczema and food allergies in foreign-born children in the U.S.
Emory’s Galina said the new CDC statistics may reflect a recent “sea change” in the recommendations for when young children should first eat certain foods.
In families with a history of eczema or food allergies, parents were advised to wait for years before introducing their young children to foods tied to severe allergies, like peanuts, milks and eggs. But professional associations changed that advice a few years ago after research suggested that allergies were more likely in those kids when the foods were delayed.
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