Adverse Reactions to Foods and Food Allergy : Development and Reproducibility of a Questionnaire for Clinical Diagnosis

Abstract EN

Objective.

To develop a questionnaire as a screening tool for adverse reactions to foods in children and to assess the technical reproducibility by test-retest.

Methods.

Reproducibility of the questionnaire was performed by the literature review, preparing the preliminary questionnaire, peer review, pretest, and retest analysis.

The study of the test-retest reproducibility was cross-sectional and descriptive.

Kappa coefficient was used to study the reproducibility of the questionnaire.

The sample consisted of 125 2–4 year-old children from 15 daycare centers in Recife, Brazil, and interviews with parents or caregivers were used to collect data.

Results.

From the total children, sixty-three were boys (50.4%), forty-six were two years old (36.8%), forty-seven were three years old (37.6%), and thirty-two were four years old (25.6%).

Forty caregivers reported that their child had health problems with food.

Most frequently reported offending foods were milk, peanuts, shrimp, and chocolate.

Nine questions showed a good Kappa index (≥0,6).

Conclusions.

The questionnaire used needs to be resized and reshaped on the basis of the issues with good internal consistency and reproducibility.

The use of a validated and reproducible questionnaire in the children represents an important contribution towards assessing an eventual rise in overt food allergy.