A recent study has found that self-reported food allergies among children are on the rise, but not as noticeable in the report is that the greatest increase was in non-Hispanic black children.
The study was published in the March 2014 issue of the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, analyzing the trends in food allergy prevalence among children via data from reports across several decades. Researchers looked at 10,090 publications from 1988 to 2011, spanning a total of more than 452,000 children.
On average, food allergy prevalence increased at a rate of about 1.2 percentage points per decade, but among black children, it was 2.1 percent per decade – roughly double the rate.
“Other conditions such as food intolerance can often be mistaken for an allergy, because not all symptoms associated with foods are caused by food allergy,” Dr. Corinne Keet, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, said in a press release.