Benefits of peanut allergy prevention strategy persist after one-year peanut avoidance

NIH | MARCH 19, 2016

The benefits of regularly consuming peanut-containing foods early in life to prevent the development of peanut allergy persist even after stopping peanut consumption for one year.

Peanut. Image credit: H. Zell/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The study, LEAP-On, is an extension of the Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study. LEAP showed that regular peanut consumption begun in infancy and continued until 5 years of age led to an 81 percent reduction in development of peanut allergy in infants deemed at high risk because they already had severe eczema, egg allergy or both.

At the end of LEAP, participants who enrolled in LEAP-On were instructed to avoid peanut consumption for one year to help investigators determine whether continuous peanut consumption is required to maintain protection against development of peanut allergy.

After the avoidance period, peanut allergy prevalence was determined, as it was in LEAP, by an oral food challenge. Only 4.8 percent of the children who had regularly consumed peanut-containing foods during LEAP were allergic to peanut following the year of peanut avoidance. In comparison, the prevalence of peanut allergy was 18.6 percent among those who had avoided peanut throughout LEAP and LEAP-On.

These new results demonstrate that regular consumption of peanut-containing foods beginning in infancy induces peanut tolerance that persists following a year of avoidance, suggesting the lasting benefits of early-life consumption for infants at high risk of developing peanut allergy.

The findings suggest that children who have regularly consumed peanut-containing foods from infancy to age 5 as a peanut allergy prevention strategy can safely switch to consuming peanut as desired as part of a normal diet.

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