Food allergy in adults in Europe: what can we learn from geographical differences?

The aim of this article is to characterize the present state-of-the-art on the topic of food allergies across Europe.

A systematic review and metaanalysis on the epidemiology of food allergy in Europe have been performed by the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Guidelines Group of the European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology. The authors had made an extensive search of four different electronic databases which retrieved thousands of hits. A critical appraisal of the documents reduced their number to just over 100 articles covering the period 2000-2012, revealing striking methodological inhomogeneity and blank areas on the map of the continent, particularly for the adult population. A major new development intending to fill in the gaps in the field of food allergy is the launch and implementation of the European Union-funded project 'Prevalence, Cost and Basis of Food Allergy Across Europe,' acronym 'EuroPrevall.' Among the deliverable of the project are several seminal articles on food allergy in adults which are presented in this review.

The EuroPrevall project confirmed much more reliably and in more detail the existing inhomogeneity in the prevalence of food allergy, which reflects environmental and climate differences between the separate countries, but possibly also the level of public awareness.