Early Oral Immunotherapy Eases Parent Food Allergy Anxiety

TOPLINE:

Preschool oral immunotherapy (OIT) was associated with a significant reduction in food allergy-specific anxiety and improvement in quality of life among parents of preschool-aged children.

METHODOLOGY:

• Researchers conducted a retrospective analysis to assess how parental food allergy-specific anxiety changed over time during OIT in preschool-aged children.
• The analysis included 788 preschool-aged children (median age, 27 months; 62% boys) receiving OIT at Canadian allergy clinics between 2021 and 2025.
• They administered the 17-item Food Allergy Quality of Life-Parental Burden (FAQL-PB) questionnaire and the 28-item Impairment Measure for Parental Food Allergy-Associated Anxiety and Coping Tool (IMPAACT) at four timepoints — baseline, end of the OIT build-up phase, and 6 and 12 months after build-up — to evaluate parental quality of life and anxiety.

TAKEAWAY:

• Preschool OIT significantly reduced parental food allergy-specific anxiety (regression weight = -18.13; P < .001), with the total IMPAACT score decreasing from a mean of 70.69 at baseline to 57.36 at the end of the build-up phase.
• The parental burden also declined sharply, with FAQL-PB scores dropping from a mean of 27.35 at baseline to 22.16 after build-up (P < .001).
• A shorter build-up duration was associated with greater improvements in parental burden scores between baseline and the end of build-up (P = .001).
• Child’s age, partial vs complete OIT, time to complete build-up, and reactions during maintenance moderated the relationship between time and some of the outcome variables.

IN PRACTICE:

“It is possible that by intervening earlier in life, allergists may help prevent the development of excessive anxiety by ensuring maladaptive beliefs and behaviours do not become entrenched over time,” the authors wrote.

SOURCE:

Lianne Soller, PhD, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, was the corresponding author of the study, which was published online on July 4 in Clinical and Experimental Allergy.

LIMITATIONS:

The study was limited by the absence of child-reported quality-of-life data, lack of a control group, possible selection bias toward participants experiencing greater anxiety or lower quality of life, and missing follow-up data likely caused by dropouts among children who experienced more reactions or parents with greater treatment-related anxiety.

DISCLOSURES:

Some authors reported serving on advisory boards, receiving honoraria or research funding, contributing to guideline development, chairing educational committees, or holding leadership positions in professional societies and various institutions and pharmaceutical companies.

This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.