New research published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics validates a phenomenon known as the allergic — or atopic — march, which refers to how allergic diseases progress in a person beginning in infancy.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) analyzed electronic health record (EHR) data collected between 1999 and 2020, from more than 200,000 pediatric patients ages 0 to 18. Their goal was to uncover patterns and prevalence of allergic disease.

Dr. Stanislaw Gabryszewski, a fellow in the Division of Allergy and Immunology at CHOP who led the study, said in a press release:

“Allergic diseases are one of the most common causes of impaired quality of life in children, so to improve the diagnosis and care of children with these diseases, it is important that we have an accurate understanding of how widespread they are, and the risk factors that are associated with them.”

The study found that children, on average, tended to be first diagnosed with eczema at 4 months old, then food allergies and asthma around 13 months, allergic rhinitis — or hay fever — at 26 months, and a rare food allergy called eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) at 35 months.

Peanut, egg and shellfish were the most commonly diagnosed food allergies.

A total of 13.4% of children had two or more allergic conditions. Patients with respiratory allergies like asthma and allergic rhinitis tended to have both conditions.

Dr. David Hill, a pediatric allergy expert at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors, told CNN, “If a child is diagnosed with one form of allergy, their likelihood of developing a second form is much higher than the general population.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Pennsylvania Allergy and Asthma Association and a CHOP Food Allergy Pilot Award. Additional infrastructure funding was provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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To examine non-biologic factors that may affect predisposition to allergies, the researchers analyzed demographic trends.

Missing from their analysis and from mainstream reporting on the study was any mention of the link between childhood vaccines and allergies  — or even why eczema develops in the first place.

Jonathan Jay Couey, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) staff scientist, told The Defender that it’s “difficult to understand what the authors hypothesize” because “they are only looking for what they want to find: racial disparities.”

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s senior director of science and research said:

“I find it incredible that the authors of the Pediatrics paper overlooked vaccines as a potential cause of allergies given that even the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has made the connection between aluminum in vaccines and asthma as well as eczema.”

Hooker was referring to a CDC-funded study showing that children who received 3 milligrams or more of vaccine-related aluminum had at least a 36% higher risk of developing persistent asthma than kids who got less than 3 milligrams.

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