Patients who are prescribed proton pump inhibitors and other gastric acid inhibitors are more susceptible to food allergies than patients who have never used them, data from more than eight million patients suggests.

Patients who have taken six daily doses or more in a year of these drugs are twice as likely to end up on anti-allergy medication, according to a University of Vienna review of Austrian health insurance records.

All classes of acid inhibitors were linked to an increased risk of allergy, except for prostaglandin E2, where numbers were too low to draw conclusions, they report in Nature Communications.

Among patients taking just one acid inhibitor, PPIs and H2-receptor antagonists were most strongly linked to future anti-allergy prescriptions (2.5 times more likely).