Allergic diseases are a significant public health concern worldwide. Reliable measures of disease prevalence at different ages are important for estimating disease burden and trends over time, informing the allocation of health care resources, and providing important knowledge for informing the design of subsequent studies.1 Prevalence studies are also useful for measuring the effectiveness of prevention or treatment strategies at the population level, as highlighted by a recent example from our group, in which the impact of changing infant feeding practices on the prevalence of peanut allergy was assessed using repeated cross-sectional studies.2

High-quality prevalence studies require a robust measurement of the outcome and recruitment of a sample that is representative of the target population.1 The longitudinal HealthNuts study has achieved this by collecting objective measures of food allergy (ie, skin prick tests [SPTs] and oral food challenges [OFCs]) and recruiting a large population-representative sample with good external validity to the target population of infants born in Victoria, Australia, with over 10 years of follow-up already completed.3 Furthermore, the prevalence of allergic diseases is known to vary with age. Therefore, reporting age-specific estimates from longitudinal studies is imperative. Few large-scale longitudinal studies have measured the spectrum of allergic diseases and included objective measures of allergy throughout childhood. The global International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Children (ISAAC) has helped address this gap by developing validated questionnaires for asthma, eczema, and rhinitis that are widely used. Collectively, studies using ISAAC questionnaires demonstrate that allergy prevalence varies by age and region. However, recent prevalence estimates from the Global Asthma Network (GAN) Phase I update (2015-2021) arising from ISAAC did not include Australia.4, 5, 6 Unfortunately, a simple and validated questionnaire for food allergy does not yet exist, and measuring food allergy with objective tools remains important.

Contemporary prevalence estimates for allergic diseases in childhood in Australia are limited and largely rely on self-reported estimates.7 The HealthNuts population-based study is the first longitudinal study in Melbourne, Australia to have objective measures of food allergy, eczema, asthma, and rhinitis throughout childhood.8, 9, 10, 11, 12 We previously reported the prevalence of allergic disease up to age 4 years in this cohort9 and the natural history of peanut and egg allergy to age 6 years.8 Here, we report the prevalence of food allergy, eczema, asthma, rhinitis, and food and aeroallergen sensitization, up to age 10 years in Melbourne, Australia.