News and Announcements
Read the latest news from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Center for Food Allergy & Asthma Research. The links below take you to articles where you can learn more about our members' latest achievements, awards and honors.
02.28.2020Food allergies affect children of different ages in different ways and can influence relationships with classmates, family and the general public, according to the study in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. "Quality of life issues related to food allergies are ubiquitous," said co-author Dr. Ruchi Gupta, director of the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
01.06.2020Feinberg has had an exceptional year in 2019, from scientific advances to the development of breakthrough therapies and treatment strategies, as well as continued excellence in educating the next generation of medical leaders.
01.03.2020Listen to a selection of the most popular episodes of the Breakthroughs podcast series produced in 2019, including a possible Amish fountain of youth, artificial intelligence, the rise of food allergies and more.
09.30.2019Northwestern has established the new Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research, which will provide investigators and patients more support while uncovering new discoveries from applied and basic science research on allergies.
- 09.20.2019Palforzia "would open up the opportunity for all allergists to be able to offer some treatment to their patients that has been protocol-driven and gone through (clinical) trials,” said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who studies food allergies. “It gives them a little more confidence to offer it.” Gupta, who also is a pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital, noted that questions still remain about the drug.
- 08.06.2019“Our study shows sesame allergy is prevalent in the U.S. in both adults and children and can cause severe allergic reactions,” Dr. Ruchi Gupta, professor of pediatrics and of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, a physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “It is important to advocate for labeling sesame in packaged food. Sesame is in a lot of foods as hidden ingredients. It is very hard to avoid.”
- 08.02.2019“It is important to advocate for labeling sesame in packaged food,” said lead study author Dr. Ruchi Gupta, an attending physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital who specializes in asthma, food allergies and eczema, in a statement. “Sesame is in a lot of foods as hidden ingredients. It is very hard to avoid.” Unlike milk and peanut allergies, which often develop early in life and are outgrown by adolescence, sesame allergies affect children and adults to a similar degree. Researchers also found 4 in 5 patients with a sesame allergy had at least one other food allergy.
- 08.02.2019“Sesame allergy is becoming a common allergy in the U.S.,” said Dr. Ruchi S. Gupta, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago and senior author of the study, which was published in the journal JAMA Network Open. “The impact on over a million people in the U.S. is significant.” The study relied on online and phone survey responses from 40,453 adults and 38,408 children. People who have had at least one symptom of sesame allergy made up an estimated 0.23 percent of the population, Dr. Gupta and her colleagues found.
- 08.02.2019Luckily, a team of researchers led by Dr. Ruchi Gupta, director of the Science and Outcomes of Allergy and Asthma Research Team at Northwestern Medicine Northwestern Medicine and a physician at Lurie Children's Hospital, already had data on hand — information from a national survey of food allergies they conducted between Oct. 1, 2015, and Sept. 31, 2016. For this study, researchers distributed surveys on food allergy diagnoses and symptoms to nearly 80,000 different people in over 50,000 households. To meet Gottlieb's request, all they had to do was pull out their sesame data and give it a look.
- 08.02.2019“Sesame allergy is becoming a common allergy in the U.S.,” said Dr. Ruchi S. Gupta, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago and senior author of the study, which was published in the journal JAMA Network Open. “The impact on over a million people in the U.S. is significant.” The study relied on online and phone survey responses from 40,453 adults and 38,408 children. People who have had at least one symptom of sesame allergy made up an estimated 0.23 percent of the population, Dr. Gupta and her colleagues found.
- 07.22.2019Dr. Ruchi Gupta is a professor of pediatrics and medicine with the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. "Using antibiotics without a prescription is dangerous for many reasons," said Gupta, who wasn't involved with the study. To avoid these dangers, she added, "getting a proper diagnosis and appropriate treatment are essential." But is antibiotic misuse on the rise? "It's hard to say, because this is an understudied problem. But what we can say is that it is a problem," Grigoryan said.
- 05.30.2019About 10% of American adults -- 26 million people -- have a food allergy, according to Dr. Ruchi Gupta, director of the Science and Outcomes of Allergy and Asthma Research Program at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. While half of these -- 13 million adults -- developed a new food allergy later in life, only about 1 in 4 never had any type of food reactions during childhood and then developed one as an adult. Importantly, most adults in Gupta's survey of more than 40,000 people had never seen a doctor about their reaction, she said -- they just started avoiding the food.
- 05.28.2019The study, headed by Dr. Ruchi Gupta – a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital – surveyed more than 40,000 adults by telephone and internet throughout the U.S. from late 2015 to late 2016. The average age of the survey population was 47 years. The primary goal of the survey was to determine how common and how severe food allergies are in adults. The survey was self-reporting, but still used strict criteria to make sure those labeled as food allergic had symptoms consistent with a "convincing" food allergy.