More than 17 percent of adults with peanut allergy reported onset in adulthood; about one in five had ED visits in past year<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n
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TUESDAY, Feb. 9, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The prevalence of current self-reported peanut allergy (PA) is 2.9 percent among U.S. adults, according to a study published online Feb. 9 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.<\/em><\/p>\n Christopher Warren, Ph.D., from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues administered a cross-sectional food allergy survey by phone and web in 2015 and 2016 (resulting in nationally representative complex-survey weighted data for 40,443 adults) to calculate the current population-level burden of adult PA in the United States.<\/p>\n The researchers found that among U.S. adults, the prevalence of current self-reported PA was 2.9 percent, with 1.8 percent having convincing PA. Onset of PA in adulthood was reported by more than 17 percent of adults with PA. Physician-diagnosed PA was reported by 75.4 percent of adults with childhood-diagnosed PA compared with 58.9 percent with adult-onset PA. Adults with childhood-onset PA were significantly more likely to have a current epinephrine prescription (56 versus 44 percent) and to use an epinephrine autoinjector (48 versus 35 percent) than those with adult-onset PA, although the frequency of food allergy-related emergency department visits within the past years was similar (about one in five adults with PA).<\/p>\n “These data indicate that substantially more U.S. adults are affected by PA than previously acknowledged, and there are important phenotypic differences between patients with childhood-onset versus those with adult-onset PA,” the authors write.<\/p>\n Two authors disclosed financial ties to the biopharmaceutical industry.<\/p>\n