Association analysis of food allergens.
Pediatr Allergy Immunol
PUBLISHED: 06-23-2009
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Food allergy patients are known to present with allergic reactions to multiple allergens, but extrapolating these associations is difficult. Data mining, a procedure that analyzes characteristic combinations among large amounts of information, is often used to analyze and predict consumer purchasing behaviour. We applied this technique to the extrapolation of food allergen associations in allergy patients. We sent 1510 families our Questionnaire survey for the prevention of food allergies. Responses noting 6549 allergens came from 878 families with 1383 patients, including 402 with anaphylaxis. Some results of the survey have already been published and here we presented the results of our association analysis of combinations of food allergens. Egg, milk, wheat, peanuts, and buckwheat are the most common food allergens. The most common simultaneous combinations of these allergens were egg-milk, egg-wheat, and milk-wheat. The occurrence probability of a combination (i.e. one person suffering from a certain allergen also suffers from another) is called confidence. Confidence was higher for chicken-egg, abalone-salmon eggs, and matsutake mushroom-milk. As well, the combinations of crab-shrimp, squid-shrimp, and squid-crab also indicated higher values in a statistical examination of the occurrence probabilities of these allergen combinations (Z-score). From the results of the association analysis, we speculated that some food allergens, such as abalone, orange, salmon, chicken, pork, matsutake mushroom, peach and apple did not independently induce food allergies. We also found that combinations, such as crab-shrimp, squid-shrimp, squid-crab, chicken-beef, and salmon-mackerel had strong associations.