A new study suggests that children born outside the United States are at a higher risk for developing allergic diseases such as asthma, eczema, hay fever and food allergies compared to other children who were born in the country.
The new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, also suggests that foreign-born children are at a higher risk for developing allergic diseases if they live in the U.S. for an extended amount of time.
"Foreign-born Americans have significantly lower risk of allergic disease than U.S.-born Americans," the study's authors wrote.
"However, foreign-born Americans develop increased risk for allergic disease with prolonged residence in the United States."
Researchers at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City analyzed data collected from the National Survey of Children's Health that encompasses 91,600 children between the ages of 0 and 16 who have been monitored since 2007-2008. The findings revealed that 20.3 percent of foreign-born children were diagnosed with one allergic disease, compared to 34.5 percent of U.S.-born children.
Researchers did not incorporate race and ethnicity into these rate calculations.
But lead researcher, Dr. Jonathan Silverberg from Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Roosevelt Hospital Center, did attribute climate, obesity and various infections as risk factors for developing allergic diseases.
"The results of the study suggest that there are environmental factors in the U.S. that trigger allergic disease," Silverberg said, Reuters reported.
"Children born outside the U.S. are likely not exposed to these factors early in life and are therefore less likely to develop allergic diseases."
Foreign-born children also had an increasingly higher risk for allergic diseases the longer they stayed in the U.S., according to the study.
Twenty-seven percent of children who immigrated to the States more than a decade ago had any type of allergic disease, compared to the 17 to 18 percent of children who had moved to the U.S. within the past two years.
"You acclimate to wherever you are and you pick up whatever is going on there," said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, who was not involved in the study, but studies allergies at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
"The findings here are very interesting-and not surprising."
Silverberg aims to use the new findings from this study to better determine what the risk factors are for allergic diseases among U.S.-born children.