Background: Chinese jujube fruits, called daechu in Korea, have high nutritional and medical value and are consumed worldwide as fresh and dry fruit, but there are few reports of side effects or allergies.
Case presentation: We present the first child’s case, having anaphylaxis to this fruit in a patient with no latex allergy, but other food allergy such as pine nuts and kiwi. We took the examination using skin prick test specific immunoglobulin E (IgE) with unicap and indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to confirm the sensitization of the causative allergen. In the skin test, the result of latex and jujube was negative, and Unicap specific IgE tests for kiwi and pine nut were 2.34 kU/L and 2.87 kU/L, and 0.55 O.D and 0.87 O.D (control group 0.36, 0.4) by indirect ELISA to kiwi and pine nut that we performed. The result of our performing indirect ELISA to jujube was positive as 0.62 O.D. (Control group 0.41).
Conclusions: It is thought that research on allergenicity of jujube and the cross-relationship between jujube allergy antigen and food allergens such as kiwi or pine nuts will be necessary in the future.