Kids' Health

When we were kids, milk and egg allergies were something a child generally outgrew. But just one generation later, these allergies now appear to be more persistent and harder to outgrow, according to new research from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, Md.

In what are believed to be the largest studies to date of children with milk and egg allergies, researchers following more than 800 patients with milk allergy and nearly 900 with egg allergy over 13 years determined that, contrary to popular belief, most of these allergies persist well into the school years and beyond. Reports on the 2 studies appeared recently in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

“The bad news is that the prognosis for a child with a milk or egg allergy appears to be worse than it was 20 years ago,” says lead investigator Dr. Robert Wood, head of Allergy & Immunology at Hopkins Children’s. “Not only do more kids have allergies, but fewer of them outgrow their allergies, and those who do, do so later than before.”

The findings also give credence to what pediatricians have suspected for some time: More recently diagnosed food allergies, for still-unknown reasons, behave more unpredictably and more aggressively than cases diagnosed in the past. “We may be dealing with a different kind of disease process than we did 20 years ago,” Wood says. “Why this is happening, we just don’t know.”

Earlier research suggested that 75% of children with milk allergy outgrew their condition by age 3. However, the Hopkins Children’s team found that just 20% of children in their studies outgrew their allergy by age 4 and only 42% outgrew it by age 8. By age 16, 79% were allergy-free.

Similar trends were seen in the egg-allergy group. Only 4% outgrew this allergy by age 4, 37% by age 10 and 68% by age 16.

One encouraging finding: Some children outgrew their allergies during adolescence, which is later than believed possible, suggesting that doctors should continue to test patients well into early adulthood to check if they may have outgrown their allergies.


Kathy Sena, a freelance journalist specializing in health and parenting issues, is the mother of a 12-year-old son. Visit her blog, “Parent Talk,” at parenttalk.typepad.com.