According to a study published in Clinical & Experimental Allergy, female patients experiencing food allergy self-reported poorer health-related quality of life (QoL) scores than their male counterparts.
Growing evidence suggests gender might play a role in health-related quality of life (HRQL) for people with food allergies, but the picture isn’t entirely clear yet. For this review, Dr. Mimi Tang and colleagues collated all investigations of the association between gender and HRQL scores of people with food allergy and their caregivers.
The researchers conducted a thorough analysis of 34 studies, encompassing both interventional and non-interventional research and spanning across different age groups-children, adults, and caregivers.
Most of these studies (28 out of 34) focused on pediatric patients, 5 on adults, 7 on caregivers, and 1 on individuals of all ages, providing a comprehensive overview of the gender-HRQL relationship in diverse populations.
The researchers reviewed 34 studies focused on children, adults, and caregivers. Most (63% for children and 83% for adults) reported females experiencing poorer health-related quality of life (HRQL) than males. This trend was true even for caregivers’ studies (50% reported lower HRQL in females).
Among the pediatric studies, the researchers observed that one showed a strong association between a child’s sex and health-related QoL. According to Dr. Tang, this association indicated that boys showed greater improvement in their health-related QoL than girls.
The researchers also noted that poorer QoL scores were reported in both girls and women compared with boys and men. However, one study did not see any sex-based differences.
Furthermore, weak evidence suggested that male children may experience more improvement in quality of life following treatment with immunotherapy compared to female children.
Dr. Tang suggests that these findings should spur physicians to follow allergy management that accounts for gender. They also call for researchers to stratify HRQL outcomes by gender in allergen immunotherapy studies.
“The heterogeneity in results obtained from included studies emphasizes the relationship between gender and HRQL [health-related QoL] in populations with a food allergy is complex and likely limited by variation in HRQL instruments applied and narrow considerations of gender,” the authors wrote.
Source: Medpage
Journal: Clinical & Experimental Allergy