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Is it true children younger than 3 shouldn't be tested for food allergies?

Is it true children younger than 3 shouldn’t be tested for food allergies?

Allergist Jay Lieberman, MD: You can test a child literally at any age for allergies. So for food allergies, what we do not recommend is to do what’s called panel testing. Meaning we don’t recommend any patient just get a bunch of food tests done, because there are a lot of false positive tests. However, there’s no reason that an infant even as young as 4 to 6 months of age couldn’t be tested. They can be tested using a skin test, like we do for other patients, or you can even do a blood test in those patients.

Now the only reason you would test an infant is they’ve had a possible reaction to a food and you want to confirm or rule out that it was truly a food allergy. Older guidelines in the United States also recommended testing some kids to peanut if they’ve had a reaction to egg or if they have moderate to severe eczema.

The current national guidelines suggest some of those patients could get test testing to peanut and if they’re not already allergic at age 6 months or 8 months, then they recommend introducing peanut into the diet to decrease that patient’s chance of having a food allergy later in life. But there’s no reason you cannot test an infant by either a blood test or skin test. It should just be done judiciously and have a very good reason to do it

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