Giving infants antibiotics while omitting nuts and eggs from their diets puts them at greater risk of developing allergies than other newborns, going by new research covering 2.8 million children around the world.
“Antibiotic use in the first month of life can lead to a higher risk of food allergy,” the team explained, while warning of a “lesser degree” of risk if the medicines are administered either “later in infancy” or during pregnancy.
The expansive study, published by the American Medical Association, “furthers our understanding of how allergies develop,” according to McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.
Babies whose parents or siblings have allergies are more likely to develop allergies too, the team found, while youngsters who develop eczema are up to four times as vulnerable to subsequent allergy onset as those who do not suffer from the skin disease.
Children should be exposed early in life to foods such as nuts and eggs.
Those who are not given peanuts until their second year are about twice as likely to develop an allergy as infants who are exposed in their first 12 months.
“Genetics alone cannot fully explain food allergy trends, pointing to interactions – or a ‘perfect storm’ – between genes, skin health, the microbiome and environmental exposures,” said McMaster’s Derek Chu.
The findings came hot on the heels of Yale University research into how “exposure to diverse microbes” soon after birth “helps block allergic reactions later in life.”
The modern obsession with cleanliness could be leaving immune systems “undertrained and more likely to overreact,” according to the Yale team.
“With industrialisation and the use of antibiotics, sanitisation, hygiene products, vaccinations, and so on, we’re increasingly protected against truly dangerous microbes, which is great,” said Yale’s Ruslan Medzhitov.
“But the tradeoff is that our immune system is in this untrained, unprepared state, and otherwise harmless exposures trigger a pathological allergic response,” he warned.
Last year the Journal of Infectious Diseases published a warning that “repeated antibiotic use before age two” could mean “a higher risk for asthma, food allergies and hay fever later in life.”
In late 2024, a Sweden-based team of scientists produced more proof of the “well established” truism that growing up on a farm amid the rough-and-tumble of rural life means “a lower risk of developing allergy.” – dpa
