The stress of food allergy issues in daily life

Abstract

Objective: Food allergies are a growing health concern, but their implications for daily psychological functioning are unknown. This micro-longitudinal study investigated the daily frequency of food allergy issues and how this related to experiences of stress, mood and physical energy.

Design: One hundred and eight adults with physician-diagnosed food allergies completed an initial Internet survey followed by a 2-week Internet daily diary survey.

Main outcome measures: The initial survey collected socio-demographic and food allergy information. The daily survey collected information about the participants’ experiences of stress, mood, physical energy and food allergy issues during that day.

Results: Commonly experienced allergy issues included negative physical symptoms, higher food prices, anxiety about safety of food, trouble maintaining a healthy diet and anxiety/stress at social occasions. Furthermore, multilevel modelling analyses showed that stress and negative mood were significantly higher on days with more allergy issues. Older adults experienced lower positive mood and physical energy on days with more issues.

Conclusion: This is the first study to incorporate near to real-time tracking to examine the frequency of food allergy issues and the implications for daily psychological functioning. Targeting the issues we identified could reduce stress in patients with food allergies and improve their overall quality of life.

Keywords:

• food allergy
• stress
• mood
• allergy issues
• daily diary
• hierarchical linear modelling

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Hadyn Youens of the University of Otago for the programming of the study website and online surveys.

Notes

1. Reliability values between .5 and .7 are common for three-item scales. Although more items would have increased reliability, a minimum number of items were chosen to keep the daily survey short. The items combined into the scales were all highly correlated with each other at the within-person level (Negative Mood; sad and anxious, B = .266, SE = .034, p < .001; sad and irritable, B = .326, SE = .035, p < .001, anxious and irritable B = .337, SE = .041, p < .001; Positive Mood; content and happy B = .619, SE = .038, p < .001; content and enthusiastic B = .549, SE = .034, p < .001, happy and enthusiastic B = .485, SE = .027, p < .001).