I have thought the exact same thing but didn't know how to word the question. You always hear of certain diseases or illnesses being more common in a certain race, or gender, or age group. Good question. . .interesting to see the results. Deanna
By the way, our family is Caucasian.

I've often thought about this as well - this doesn't speak to ethnicity, but we went to a food allergy support group picnic recently and my husband made the comment, "It looks like peanut allergy is carried on the 'petite mom' gene". And he's right - 95% of the moms there were short and small-framed.
Another thing I've noticed is a lot of p.a. kids and/or their parents have fair skin, and many are redheads, myself included.
Anyone else made similar observations?

the lack of access to the internet by minorities makes whatever observations done here totally moot as far as any kind of statistical study on the genetic tendencies of this allergy.
as was pointed out, asthmatic and allergy suffering minorities are vastly underreported and undertreated. Statistically speaking many more African Americans die from asthma and asthma related diseases than white Americans due to the incredible disparity of economics, health care, education, etc.

The Chicago Tribune this weekend had a front page article a/b the boom in asthma and related illnesses, including allergies, in the West, presumably caused by our underutilized immune systems which have to fight something, so if there are no germs or diseases to fight off, they go berserk over dust mites or peanuts instead. Third World people have a much lower incidence of asthma and allergies. Even in this country, children who were in fulltime daycare before age 6 mos. have a much lower incidence of asthma and allergies (including food allergies) than babies cared for at home. We're supposed to stop already with the antibacterial soap, the floors clean enough to eat off, etc., and let our kids eat "a bushel of dirt" (according to this article) by the time they start school.

Well, I'm a Caucasian, Heinz 57, of European descent. I'm 5'7", brunette (though blonde as a child), blue eyes, medium skin. Hardly the "petite mom" syndrome here!! However, my husband's side of the family is petite. His mom is not quite 5 feet tall and my husband is only 5'6". His family is of South American descent with some European mixed in. My daughter picked up all the dominant genes (dark brown hair, very dark brown eyes) and she has NO allergies. My son picked up all the recessives. He is blond, blue eyed and allergic to everything.
Both my husband and I have some type of allergies on both sides of the family.
Christine

Well I have fair skin, red hair and am only 5'5. However my neighbor and the little boy at my daughter's school with this allergy are both tall and black. Go figure!
Linda

This is an interesting subject! Let's see Axel (who is PA) is about average for his second grade class height and weight wise, he is blonde and brown green eyes, He also has asthma, exzema(sp)and allergies to chocolate, strawberries and amoxicillin. His sister is Blonde, blue eyed and tall and thin, she also has asthma and exzema, as well as has the trait for thalasemia, but no food allergies.
My husband has asthma and environmental allergies. I have environmental allergies and an allergy to sulfa. Neither of us would fit the small and petite category. My husband is about 5'6" and around 200lbs. I am 5'4" and defintely big boned as some people say. My husband is french, english and indian where I am french swedish indian. go figure how we get some of these things that generally go to certain groups.

OK, I'm going to screw up any possible assumptions & suppositions: our 22-month-old PA child is brown-haired, brown-eyed, & of Mexican (Spanish & Olmec Indian), Cherokee, English, Irish, Scottish, & German heritage. He's 35" tall & weighs approx. 30 lbs. His mom is 5'6" & skinny. His dad is 6'3" & slim.
His mom was a peanut butter fiend during pregnancy & breast feeding.

This is a really interesting thread... I'm caucasian (adopted so don't know my ancestry) and have been told I look Scottish. I'm 5'4" with a very small frame. I had red hair as a child and am fair skinned with blue eyes. I KNOW my kids inherited their PA from me. Logan is medium skinned, light brown hair, blue eyes, petite. Lauren is tall (36" at 22 mos) but has a small bone structure. Her skin is light/medium, hair blonde, eyes blue.
An interesting aside, the Nurse Practitioner at our pedi office made the comment to me one time that children with allergies tend to have really long eyelashes. Both my kids have incredible lashes.
Rebekah

Ok, here's ours.... =)
Hubby-- last name Casey (how Irish can you get? lol) TONS of enviromental allergies, and he suspects what he calls a "mild chocolate allergy" 5' 9" Yes, Irish. *g* with reddish tints in his hair. He WAS fair-skinned as a child, but over time he's darkened up some. *note--he has two sisters and two nephews with tons of enviromental allergies.
Me (the mommy. lol)-- maiden name Terry (gotta love those Irish names!) Asthma, allergic to eggs as a child, and some 'new' enviromental allergies. They didn't crop up until I was pg with my first, but they've stuck around. =( I'm 5'. I claim red hair, but in actuality it hasn't been truly red since I was about 8mo old. It is now 'strawberry blond', but really looks more red when I'm in the sun. =) VERY fair skin. I look like a ghost year-round, and can burn in under 30min! *note- Most of my family has asthma. More than half also have enviromental allergies. One of my brothers had severe eczema as a child...poor kid would scratch to the bone (literally!) it itched so bad. Have no idea what caused it.
Meagan (notice the Irish spelling, it's there for a reason! hehe)-- She's only 2.5yo, but by doubling her height at two years, she is predicted to reach a whole 5' 2". Reddish blond hair. Not as red as I had hoped for, but it'll have to do. VERY fair skin. She burns sooo easy too. No known allergies thus far.
Matthew Ryan (named after granpa, otherwise his 1st name would've been decidely Irish!) -- Matt is our PA kiddo. He's 22mo, so still several months away from the 'predicting age' for adult height (boys is 2.5yr). Last year from age 2mo to about 10mo or so, he was dealing with FTT. At 12mo, he was much smaller than his sister was at 12mo. Today, he is smaller than his sister was at this age, so we're still a little concerned that he will be VERY short as an adult. I'm just hoping he can make it to 5' 7"!! Reddish blond curly (where he got the curls we don't know!) hair, fair skin, but not as fair as myself or his sister. Allergic to peanuts, but so far as we know, nothing else. He has had other 'probs' though. Like the umbilical hernia that still has not corrected itself. He has another 2mo, and then we will have to look into getting it fixed.

I'm starting to feel somewhat guilty!! There are an estimated 70 million people in the world with Irish ancestry, maybe it's our fault, LOL!!.
We'll, I'm Irish as far as anyone can remember, but I have an English surname, so I guess there must be some English in my genes. I have light brown hair (when the dye runs out!), blue eyes and pale skin with freckles. My mother is a red head with lots of freckles, but my dad is dark with brown eyes. They're both quite small and I'm 5'4" (but I don't see that as very small).

rebekahc -
That's interesting about the eyelashes - my daughter, Erin (can you guess we're of Irish descent, too?), has very long eyelashes. Things that make you go hmmmmm....

O-K. . .the eyelash thing is interesting! My husband has very long eyelashes. When we were dating, I used to make fun of him (actually I was just jealous) and ask him how he could even see out of his eyes without his lashes getting in the way. He has severe environmental allergies. Both of my boys inherited his eyelashes and unfortunately his allergies. My oldest son is the one with pa and we don't know yet about my younger one.
By the way, we are also of Irish decent. I am 5'3", blonde (when younger), blonde by choice now!, small-boned, and very fair-complected. Deanna

Ok, I'm Jewish--Eastern European/Russian descent, and my husband's family is from Guam. How's that for ethnic background? My kids are most definitely not fair-skinned. However, just to keep it interesting, someone did geneology on my husband's family, and his great-great-great-great-great-grandfathter was Scottish!

Hi our allergist told us that usually Blonde hair blue eyed children have allergy to foods. I have no idea if this is any of your cases but my son fits this to a tee. My daughter is olive skinned brown eyed and darker hair than him. My brother has blue eyes and food allergies. My little 2 year old has the blue eyes and light hair. I am not sure yet with him. My younger brother is blue eyed and allergic to bees. My whole family is Irish also. My grandfather was from Ireland. this is so interesting. MY husband is where my daughter gets her looks and my boys look just like my side. My daughter started out looking just like myself and completly changed to daddy side. his is very interesting. Claire

My mother and father are both from P.R. and my husband's family history is traced back to Scotland. It is my 4th and youngest who has P.A. and yes she also has long lashes but so do all my children. They are all caucasion but I wouldn't exactly call them fair skinned. My P.A. DD has brown hair and normal ht.& wt. for a 4 year old.
Are we related? ;-) I guess if we aren't genetically, we are related to some degree. I have a wonderful child that I have to protect and educate about a potentially dangerous allergy. If you do too, then I can relate!

Thanks so much for starting this thread! This is th type of thing to provoke statistics and the beginnings of hypotheses!! I have often wondered why the Food Allergy Network doesn't send out a survey to all members!!????!?!?!?
My pa son Alan is blond with blue eyes (and, yes, long lashes!), and very petite. We thought he was the first in the family with food allergies, but my adult cousin just developed a severe banana allergy a few years ago...and....I just found out last week that another of my adult cousins (half Irish) recently learned she is severely pa.
I am 5'1" and fair-skinned (ditto the comment about looking like a ghost - that's me!). I have dark brown hair and blue eyes and my ethnic background is Irish, Italian, and Lithuanian.
My husband is 5'7" and also fair-skinned. He has strawberry-blond hair, blue eyes, lots of freckles. Just adorable! His background is primarily Norwegian & Danish, but he says there is a smorgasbord of other ethnicities too (small percentage, though).
I hope we can keep this survey going!

Well, my husband and I are both Jewish, of Eastern European descent. And, I do not fit the "petite mom" syndrome, although I wish I did! I'm interested in this thread, as I had actually thought that food allergies are common among Jewish people. When I mentioned this to a woman at FAN, however, she seemed to get quite annoyed with me, and told me that ethnic background has nothing to do with food allergies. I don't know how she could be so certain, however.

I am 6'1" tall and 160lb male. Very slender to say the least. I have extremely long eyelashes, was blonde as a child, green eyes. I am now 22.
I was one month premature. My ethnic background is mostly German and Norwegian but I also have Irish and Italian ancestery. I have environmental and food allergies besides peanuts. My mother's family has some very small women in it...my mom though is 5'7". I am the only person in my family that has even a hint of food allergies. My mother was also a clean-freak when I was growing up...maybe I had a really bored immune system?
BTW: My boss' son is PA. He is half African-American and my boss' wife is caucasian. So atleast he would have the chance of having some caucasian traits, particularly those carried on the maternal side.

I'll throw a couple things in here.
First, I'm Half Asian(Phillipines) and the other half a mixture of French/German(Just in reply to ScaredoftheWalnutAisles' post I do have Thalssemia(genetic) and I passed this on to my daughters,definately an Asian trait). My wife is Caucasian and I would say fits the "petite" model with Blond hair and Hazel eyes. My daughter with the PA has a mix of our traits,light green eyes and very dark hair. As with Lam's post she is definately ahead of her age in intelligence and understanding [img]http://uumor.pair.com/nutalle2/peanutallergy/smile.gif[/img]
To throw a little change in the mix I have a cousin who is 100% Filipino who's wife is 100% Japanese. Their son is PA(because of this my wife blames my side of the family for our daughter's allergies..lol)

Very interesting. My 5 year old PA daughter is extremely fair with white-blond hair, blue eyes and extremely long eye lashes. The eye lash connection is interesting. Her father's eyelashes are strikingly long and from the time my daughter had eyelashes people would comment on their incredible length. Also, it seems there are a lot of PA children who are in the 5 to 6 year old range. Please comment on age.

Amy Frankel, what you've posted about the recessive genes is so interesting. I am of European descent (English and French Canadian) and my husband is Palestinian Arab. We have two kids and one looks Arab while the other looks European (fair, light brown hair). It's the fair one who has asthma and food allergies.

just wanted to add a couple of things to mine. =) We all have long eyelashes!! lol Also, my mom is severely allergic to penicillin as well. I never even thought of that till I saw that last post.

I couldn't resist responding to this - here goes. I am 5'1", 105 lbs, blue eyes, light brown hair with reddish tint, very fair skin - almost transparent. My husband is 6', over 200 lbs., dark brown hair and eyes, dark complexion. Neither my husband nor I have any allergies, but there are allergies on both sides of our families. My son has my coloring exactly - and allergies (a lot of them).

Okay, here goes....maybe this will screw everything up. I am 5'5", 115 lbs. Dark brown hair, dark brown eyes. Korean born, grew up in America in a family of Dutch descent. My DH is 5'8" 170 lbs (?), of German descent, possibly some Indian blood mixed in (India, that is), brown hair (he was blonde as a baby), brown eyes. His father was blonde (he's grey now)with blue eyes. His mother has dark brown hair and brown eyes. I am allergic to penicillin, alder pollen, grass pollen, dust mites. DH is allergic to alder, grass, rockfish (such as lingcod), stone fruits.
So that makes Patricia half Korean and half German. She is 17 1/2 months old, about 33" tall and about 23 lbs. She has medium brown hair and dark brown eyes. She is allergic to eggs and milk, slightly reactive to wheat, and anaphylaxic to peanuts.
And someone earlier mentioned intellegence. Patricia is far ahead of her peers in language and communication development and in fine motor skills. She already uses simple logic to solve problems. And she is very wary of anything new. She is very cautious about trying new foods or being in new surroundings.
Amy
[This message has been edited by Triciasmom (edited November 04, 2000).]

Okay, I can't resist adding more about my family [img]http://uumor.pair.com/nutalle2/peanutallergy/smile.gif[/img]
The c after my name stands for my married name Campbell. My husbands family is Scotish and Native American. My grandfather (English/Irish) had many food allergies including peanuts. The intellegence factor is interesting, too. I'm in the top 2% IQ wise and was considered "gifted." Both of my PA kids seem to be gifted, too - especially my super allergenic 4 year old. Seems we all have some things in common other than PA, and the Scotish/Irish descent seems very prevalent. How intriguing!
Rebekah

I find this thread VERY interesting! Our son is 3 1/2 years old and PA. I am of Hungarian descent with brown hair and hazel eyes. My only allergy is to house dust. My husband however is of Irish descent, very fair, blue eyes and red hair. Everyone comments on how our son looks just like his dad (very fair). He also has extremely long eyelashes (which neither his father or I have!) Since finding out about our son's PA, we have also learned that at least 4 relatives on my husband's side also have PA. I think we may be on to something with the Irish background commonality! [img]http://uumor.pair.com/nutalle2/peanutallergy/smile.gif[/img]

Seems like every time I read this thread, something else is being added to the statistics. lol Ok, as far as the intelligence things goes. Both my husband and I have IQs that fall in the "genius" range. (boy do I hate labels! grrr) Anyway, with both our IQs being high, we weren't surprised a bit when our oldest (non PA) started progressing far ahead of others her age. Like I said, I don't like to label kids, so we haven't actually tested her for giftedness, but I'm sure she would qualify.
As for Matt (PA), he is trickier to figure. He was very slow in starting to walk/talk compared to his sister, but did so well within the normal range. I say he is harder to figure out, because we really believe he COULD have walked and talked sooner had he felt like it. We did catch him walking when he didn't realize we were looking a couple of times, but if he knew someone was watching he wouldn't take even a step. He is just very stubborn. lol His fine motor skills and social skills are far above his age level. The only thing he is still AT level on is his speech, but like I said that is mostly because he is simply stubborn as a mule. (an example of this would be refusing to say "daddy" to Daddy. He would only do so when Daddy was not here, if Mike asked him to say it he would grin and tell him "No!", even though he COULD say it.) I would presume that if we tested him for 'giftedness', he too would qualify.

I have met several asian peanut allergic people, both of vietnamese and chinese descent. I think there is a little more to this than "Irish".
The San Jose mercury news had an article about a company that is trying to get a genetic profile on 20 diseases. They list it as [url="http://www.DNA.com"]www.DNA.com[/url] and the company as DNA Sciences of Mountain View, CA. They were looking for subjects with athsma, MS, diabetes, etc. The other companies they cited were DeCode Genetics and Framingham Genomic Medicine. I have no further info. I cut out the article, but have never looked into it further.
If we really wanted to find a genetic basis, maybe we could try and get funding for a company like this to actually run a scientific study. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could give and infant a blood test to check for this tendency? Then you could do your best to avoid early exposure to the allergen.

off topic here....
Philip's Mom-- We also taught Matt some simple signs to use, and he does still use some of them. For the most part, though, once he started using the actual word he quit using the sign. A couple of friends had said to me that we should have him in speech therapy, etc, but we felt that as long as he was communicating in some form it wasn't necessary. I miss seeing him make the signs too! It's sooo cute to watch! =) 'please' and 'dinosaur' are my favorites for him to do. He still uses both of those signs.

really off topic:
phillip's mom, I scored a perfect LSAT score (law school admissions) and that qualifies for an automatic membership in MENSA. I would suspect your husband's SAT score would do the same!

A few people have mentioned German heritage, so for the record, I thought I'd mention mine - my mother was 100% German.
As far as intelligence goes, that theory's blown - I'm pretty stupid and my husband's just an out and out dimwit. [img]http://uumor.pair.com/nutalle2/peanutallergy/tongue.gif[/img]
[This message has been edited by jh5000 (edited November 06, 2000).]

Hi! For the record I am a 5'6" German with a little English and Dutch. My husband is a 5"6" German (due to hieght I had to get rid of all my heels, but that is possibly another thread). There are some slight animal, dust and environmental allergies in our families, but no nuts.(I mean allergies to peanuts, I can't truthfully say there aren't a few nuts on my side of the family). Looking back at my pregnancy, I did crave peanuts. I purchased a five pound bag of peanut m and m's and would have a small cup from the bag every day. Could this be a key?

Here's my two cents - I am of Irish and German descent. My wife is Japanese (and yes, she is very petite). Our son, who is PA, has Japanese characteristics, i.e. black hair, etc. Although he is more fair skinned than most Japanese, he is darker than me.
We know of a family in our town with a PA son, and they are of Middle Eastern descent (maybe Turkish or Pakastan). I think PA can occur in anyone.

Here's my two cents - I am of Irish and German descent. My wife is Japanese (and yes, she is very petite). Our son, who is PA, has Japanese characteristics, i.e. black hair, etc. Although he is more fair skinned than most Japanese, he is darker than me.
We know of a family in our town with a PA son, and they are of Middle Eastern descent (maybe Turkish or Pakastan). I think PA can occur in anyone.