BALTIMORE, Dec. 13 Milk and egg allergies appear to be more persistent and harder to outgrow than earlier believed, a U.S. study has found.
Milk and egg allergies were considered "transitional" a generation ago, but a Johns Hopkins Children's Center study that tracked 800 patients with milk allergy and nearly 900 with egg allergy over 13 years found most of the allergies persisted well into school years and beyond.
Lead investigator Dr. Robert Wood, head of Allergy & Immunology at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, cautioned that their findings may reflect the fact that relatively more severe cases end up at Hopkins Children's, but the researchers believe there is a trend toward more severe, more persistent allergies.
Earlier research suggested that three-quarters of children with a milk allergy outgrew their condition by age 3, but the Johns Hopkins team found that one-fifth of children in their studies outgrew their allergy by age 4, 42 percent outgrew it by age 8 and by age 16, 79 percent were allergy-free, reported the study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
Copyright 2007 by UPI
