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by danaris
1277 days ago
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They are, but that's a potentially misleading statistic, on two counts: First, it doesn't give any indication of the percentage of children with food allergies. Is it also about 20% (which would mean sesame allergies affect approximately 4% of children)? Or is it more like 4% (which would mean sesame allergies affect approximately 0.8% of children)? Second, it doesn't say anything about the severity of the allergy. My brother-in-law has a severe, anaphylactic allergy to peanuts. Traces of peanut in anything he eats could kill him. On the other hand, I have a close friend with an allergy to tree nuts...that makes his throat kinda itchy for a while if he eats too many. Yes, we need to be mindful of food allergies, and properly label foods for them. But that doesn't mean we should be using incomplete or misleading statistics to inform our decisions about how prevalent serious problems with certain foods could be. |
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> Using survey responses from 78 851 individuals, an estimated 0.49% (95% CI, 0.40%-0.58%) of the US population reported a current sesame allergy, whereas 0.23% (95% CI, 0.19%-0.28%) met symptom-report criteria for convincing IgE-mediated allergy. An additional 0.11% (95% CI, 0.08%-0.16%) had a sesame allergy reported as physician diagnosed but did not report reactions fulfilling survey-specified convincing reaction symptoms. Among individuals with convincing IgE-mediated sesame allergy, an estimated 23.6% (95% CI, 16.9%-32.0%) to 37.2% (95% CI, 29.2%-45.9%) had previously experienced a severe sesame-allergic reaction, depending on the definition used, and 81.6% (95% CI, 71.0%-88.9%) of patients with convincing sesame allergy had at least 1 additional convincing food allergy. Roughly one-third of patients with convincing sesame allergy (33.7%; 95% CI, 26.3%-42.0%) reported previous epinephrine use for sesame allergy treatment.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...