Abstract
Food allergy prevalence is rising in recent years; it almost doubled between 1999 and 2011. In Europe, it currently occurs in 6-8% of children and 3-6% of adults.
The spectrum of most frequent triggering foods, types of food sensitization, and symptoms of food allergy are geographically unevenly distributed and differ.The aim of our work was to prospectively gather epidemiological data on food allergies in patients from different regions of the Czech republic. During the 3 years of follow up, we enrolled 1 747 patients into registry with newly diagnosed food allergy from almost the whole country, 22% breastfed infants, 26 % children at the age of 1 to 6 years, 25% kids between 7 and 18 years and 27% adults.
We compared the types of the most frequent triggering foods in relation to age, type of pressenting symptoms, the prevalence of IgE sensitization considering the context of available data from the other parts of europe, and the rest of the world. We have found that the spectrum of food allergies in the Czech republic bears a certain specific pattern.
Among the most important, it is the low occurrence of reactions to soy and wheat flour, high occurrence of reactions to seeds (mainly the poppy), and increasing significance of cashew nuts, mainly in smaller children.Surprisingly, the third most common allergen in kids of 1 to 18 years of age was the peanut. Despite cartain limitastions, this work introduces the first data on the epidemiology of food allergies in the Czech republic using such a large population sample.