Health: Hope For Preventing Peanut Allergy

By Stephanie Stahl

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Peanut allergies are no joke. They can be serious, even deadly, and they affect millions of children. Research released Friday could prevent babies from ever developing a peanut allergy. A growing body of research shows exposing babies to peanuts can help prevent allergies to them, and now there's a new component of the ongoing peanut research.

Eight-year-old Andreas Angelopoulos can eat anything he likes, but as a baby, having the skin condition eczema put him at high risk of developing a peanut allergy.

Tara Orlanes-Angelopoulou, his mother, said, "Knowing that with eczema he might have lots of allergies, yeah, we were worried."

So when Andreas was just a newborn, he took part in a landmark study in London with about 600 other children.

"I had to eat these different things with peanuts," Andreas said.

Andreas ate a peanut mixture several times a week for the first five years of his life.

Findings published last year showed introducing peanuts to infants at high risk for allergies protected them from peanut allergies in up to 80 percent of cases. But researchers wanted to know if children would need to keep eating peanuts to get the same results.

Dr. Gideon Lack, professor of pediatric allergy at Kings College London, said, "We took all these children and we asked them to completely stop eating peanuts for a 12-month period."

Doctors found children who avoided peanuts for the year were still protected.

"It would appear early consumption of peanuts gives you long-lasting protection against peanut allergy," Dr. Lack said.

Now that Andreas can make his own choices, there's really only one thing he craves: "Pizza."

A second study released Friday suggests the early strategy could  work with eggs too. It found that allergies to peanuts and eggs were less common in young children who started eating those foods at three months of age than in children who were breastfed-only as infants.