People With Food Allergies Seem to Have Lower Risk of SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Since the start of the global epidemic, researchers have been trying to figure out who is most at risk.

A new study from the National Institutes of Health has found that people with allergies have an advantage over people without allergies.

In an analysis of more than 4,000 people who all lived in households that included minor children, researchers found that people with a food allergy were only half as likely to get the disease.

Recent research found that allergic conditions, like asthma, might offer some protection against severe cases of COVID-19.

Asthma is a condition that impacts the respiratory system, but the new study found that it was not linked to increased risk of the disease.

The age of children and teens sharing the living space was a factor that increased the risk of the disease.

The finding with regard to food allergies might be the most remarkable.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says that he observed an association between food allergy and the risk of infection with the disease.

There are a few possible explanations for why people with food allergies are less vulnerable to the disease.

Half of the participants in the study claimed to have been diagnosed with a food allergy. The self-reports were backed up by a subset of blood tests which showed the antibodies linked to allergic disease.

From May 2020 to February 2021, researchers tracked the spread of the disease.

People with asthma and the skin disease, Eczema, did not show any extra vulnerability to the virus.

People with food allergies were 50 percent less likely to get the disease.

Not all forms of asthma are atopic, and previous studies have shown that only those with atopic asthma express lower airway levels of the ACE2 receptor.

This shows that the virus doesn't have as many ways to invade the lungs of people with respiratory allergies.

The authors only looked at the severity of the infection, but it could be that something similar is happening among people with food allergies.

It is not known whether this is also the case in food allergic individuals, but it is tempting to speculate that type 2 inflammation, a characteristic of food allergy, may reduce airwayACE2 levels and thus the risk of infection.

We found that those with a food allergy had higher levels of general atopy than those without a food allergy and even those with asthma.

The current study found that allergic asthma does not protect against the initial contraction of the virus.

When a participant with asthma or food allergies contracted the novel coronaviruses, they were not more likely to besymptomatic.

The authors are hopeful that their research can offer new avenues for COVID-19 prevention, but further research is needed to tease apart the mechanisms behind the new findings.

The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published the study.