Temporal Trends in Food Sensitization in U.S. Children

描述（由申请人提供）：在过去的几十年里，食物过敏的患病率似乎迅速上升，导致对这种明显的“流行病”的原因进行了大量研究。然而，由于显示患病率增加的数据主要是基于问卷调查，我们知道问卷调查高估了临床证实的食物过敏，我们真的不知道这种明显的流行病有多真实。调查问卷中看到的患病率增加可能代表了食物过敏诊断的变化，而这种疾病的生物标志物保持不变。另一个未知因素是，在自我报告的数据中看到的食物过敏患病率日益增长的种族/种族差异是否与真正的生物学差异有关。为了确定在自我报告的食物过敏中发现的趋势是否与食物过敏的生物测量变化相关，我们建议测量1988-1994年收集的国家健康与营养检查调查（NHANES） III的储存样本中的食物特异性IgE，以便将其与NHANES 2005-6中已经测量的结果进行比较。目的1是比较在大约15年的时间里，美国儿童对牛奶、鸡蛋、花生或虾的特定IgE的敏感性和临床食物过敏的可能性。目的2是验证非西班牙裔黑人在此期间经历了更大的增敏率和更高的特异性IgE的假设。综合起来，这些目标将回答食物过敏流行病学领域的基本问题。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Food allergy appears to have risen rapidly in prevalence over the past few decades, leading to much research into the causes of this apparent 'epidemic'. Yet, because the data showing increased prevalence are largely based on questionnaires, and we know that questionnaires overestimate clinically confirmed food allergy, we truly do not know how real the apparent epidemic is. It is possible that the increased prevalence seen in the questionnaires represents changes in the diagnosis of food allergy, and that biologic markers of this disease remain unchanged. An additional unknown is whether the growing ethnic/racial disparities in food allergy prevalence seen in the self-reported data relate to true biologic differences. In order to determine whether the trends that are found in self reported food allergy correlate with changes in biologic measures of food allergy, we propose to measure food specific IgE in stored samples from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) III, collected from 1988-1994, in order to compare it to that already measured in NHANES 2005-6. Aim 1 is to compare the prevalence of sensitization and higher likelihood of clinical food allergy, both as measured by specific IgE to milk, egg, peanut or shrimp, in U.S. children over this approximately 15 year period. Aim 2 is to test the hypothesis that Non-Hispanic Blacks have experienced greater increases in prevalence of sensitization and higher specific IgE over this period. Combined, these aims will answer fundamental questions in the field of food allergy epidemiology.