A comprehensive Japanese cohort study reveals how immune-signalling proteins and placental DNA methylation patterns can predict the persistence or remission of food allergies in children, offering new insights into early diagnosis and personalised treatment.
A Japanese birth-cohort study has taken a closer look at how childhood food allergy can change over time, following 2,382 children in the COCOA study through age seven and narrowing the final analysis to 1,518 participants. The supplementary material shows that the researchers excluded children after withdrawals, missing data and incomplete clinic attendance, leaving a group large enough to examine longer-term allergy patterns rather than a single snapshot in early life.
The analysis grouped food allergy into different trajectories, including no food allergy, early remission, early transient and early persistent patterns. By age one, children in the early persistent group were more likely to be allergic to soy, peanuts, wheat, buckwheat, nuts and crustaceans than those in other groups. The paper’s supplementary figures suggest the investigators were trying to identify whether particular allergen profiles could help distinguish children whose allergy was likely to fade from those at risk of continuing symptoms.
The study also moved beyond clinical observation. Serum cytokine profiling, which looks at immune-signalling proteins in the blood, was carried out on 251 randomly selected children at ages three and seven, while placental DNA methylation analysis was performed on 59 randomly selected samples. The supplementary material highlights methylation signals in genes including RPS6KA2 and GCSAML, and reports positive correlations with IL-2 and IL-5 at age seven. Receiver operating characteristic analysis, a statistical method used to judge how well a marker separates one group from another, was then used to test whether methylation levels might help predict which food-allergy trajectory a child would follow.
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