My grandmother still can’t fathom the fact that people have such strict dietary needs now in days. When she was a kid food allergies were nonexistent. Fast forward a decade, when my dad was a kid “peanut allergies” were were not a thing. Now think about when you were in elementary school; there was at least a handful of students in just your class alone with a peanut allergy. I’m sure even a good portion of you reading this have dietary restrictions such as gluten, dairy, or shellfish. In 1997, .4% of children in the United States had a food allergies. In 2010, that number increased by 1 whole percent! Just five years later, that number is most likely even higher! So why has the the quantity of allergens dramatically increased over the years?

Doctors have noticed that not only the amount of allergens have increased, but so has the amount of children diagnosed with allergies. CNN Though hypotheses have been theorized and a large amount of experiments have been conducted, there is still no definitive answer why allergies have grown.

Early theories suggested that exposing infants to peanut products at an early age would “sensitize” them and result in a fatal peanut allergy (pediatrics), so mothers would avoid eating peanuts during pregnancy, and withhold peanut exposure to their kids until the age of three so their body was further developed. This theory was proven as a false positive in 2008 due to the lack of change in the quantity of people with peanut allergies. (NY Times)

A more up to date hypothesis support the opposite hypothesis of the previous one. It argues that early exposure will in fact decrease a child’s probability of developing
a peanut allergy. “In a recent study of 8,205 children, 140 of whom had allergies to nuts,
researchers found that children whose nonallergic mothers had the highest consumption of peanuts or tree nuts, or both, during pregnancy had the lowest risk of developing a nut allergy. The risk was most reduced among the children of mothers who ate nuts five or more times a month.” (archpedi)

Though there have been trials that show a correlation between early exposure and a decrease in the amount of peanut allergies, there is no way to prove that this correlation is causation for a decrease in nut allergies. First of all, there is no way of the scientist kno
wing if the child was predisposed to having the allergy. So it would not matter how many peanuts the mother ate while pregnant, the infant could have never had a predisposition of the al
lergy. Though this hypothesis seems logical, it is impossible to prove true.

If I were to run a trial, attempting to understand the growth in allergies, I would construct a randomized control trial. The trial would consist of 100 babies between the ages of 1-3, 100 teenagers between the ages 15-18, all with peanut allergies. I would then als
o test a third age groups of children 1-3 without peanut allergies. Once a week, each child would visit a hospital and would get injected with a peanut protein. Every week, they would be injected with more protein than the last week. Their reactions would be recorded and this trial would run for 1 year. After the year, I would examine the differences between the 1-3 year old allergies group, and the 15-18 allergy group. Within those two groups, I would see if the immunization had any effect. I would also see if the age difference had any effect, due to the fact that a child between the ages of 1 and 3 still have a developing body while a teen is much more
further developed. This will prove if immunization and exposure actually do have an effect on the prevention of allergies, and it will also show if early exposure makes a difference. The children ages 1-3 without the peanut allergies are also in the experiment as a precaution to see if any of them could develop an allergy within the trial. The non-allergic group can often be overlooked or viewed as unimportant, but it is a vital part. My best friend use to eat p
anuts without a problem, yet in 2014 at the age of 16, she developed an allergy to nuts. Could this trial have prevented that?

My trial was based off the immunotherapy trial conducted in Cambridge. The difference between them though is I think it is important to test different age groups, as well as kids without an allergy already. The Cambridge trial only tested kids 7-16. But we want to see if early immunization has a greater effect. Also, the Cambridge trial lasted for 6
months, and used 39 participants. Cambridge Trial My trial will be tested for a longer duration of time, and using more participants in order to receive more results.