Diagnosis of food allergy utilizes a combination of clinical
history, elimination diets, oral food challenges (OFCs),
and
tests of sensitization to detect the presence of allergen-specific
IgE, such as the skin prick test (SPT). OFCs are the gold
standard of food allergy diagnosis, but they are expensive,
time-consuming, and potentially dangerous. SPT on the other
hand is cheap, safe, and easy to perform, but they have low
specificity to food allergy. Sensitization may be present without
a clinically significant reaction upon eating the food; that
is, sensitization status from SPT is imperfectly correlated with
the result of an OFC