What Is Celiac Disease?
Celiac disease is being diagnosed more frequently. Learn about the role of gluten in celiac disease and how celiac disease can be treated.
Celiac disease, also known as celiac sprue or gluten-sensitive enteropathy, is a digestive illness that occurs due to the ingestion of gluten. If you have celiac disease, your intestines cannot tolerate the presence of gliadin, which is a component of gluten. Gluten is present in wheat, barley, and rye. When a person with celiac disease eats foods with gluten, such as bread or cereal, their immune system inappropriately reacts to the ingested gluten and causes inflammation and injury to the small intestine. This results in symptoms such as diarrhea, bloating, and weight loss, as well as an inability to absorb important food nutrients.
"In the beginning, human beings didn't eat any foods made with flour. We ate meat and fish, fruits, vegetables, and a small amount of different whole grains. There were no cookies, bread, cake, or pasta," explains Art DeCross, MD, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.
"The immune system in the lining of the intestine decides which items to let in and which to keep out. This human digestive and immune system[s] have been around for a few million years.
Wheat flour as a food source has only been available for the last 7,000 to 8,000 years. For people with celiac disease, this 'new' food source is not something to be tolerated but something to be reacted against," says Dr. DeCross.
Celiac Disease: The Effect of Exposure to Gluten
The cause of celiac disease is a combination of genes you are born with and an abnormal response of your immune system to gluten. Celiac disease is more common in people of European descent and tends to run in families.
On a very simple level, you could think of celiac disease as an intestinal wheat allergy. But as DeCross explains, the correct, medical way of looking at celiac disease is "an immunologically mediated attack of the intestinal lining which occurs in certain people with a genetic predisposition to have their immune systems identify gliadin as a 'foreign' molecule."
The result is inflammation and injury to the lining of the intestine. "This injury eliminates the ability of the intestine to absorb normal nutrients. As a result, the person with celiac can have diarrhea, or bloating, or failure to grow, or other consequence of malabsorbing nutrients, like iron-deficiency anemia and osteoporosis."
Celiac Disease: How Common Is It?
It was once thought that celiac disease was a rare disease that primarily affected children. As blood tests have become available to identify celiac disease, the diagnosis is becoming more common. One out of every 133 people in the United States has celiac disease. In fact, celiac disease is now one of the most commonly occurring genetic diseases in the world, and it has been estimated that 97 percent of the people with celiac disease have not been diagnosed yet.
"Celiac disease isn't necessarily becoming more common. We are finally learning to recognize it and screen for it aggressively. The biggest breakthrough has been realizing that the majority of patients with celiac, up to 80 percent, don't have any severe gastrointestinal symptoms. They have manifestations of the disease in other ways," says DeCross.
Celiac Disease: How Is It Treated?
"The treatment is the easiest feature," he continues. "Avoid all gliaden! A gluten-free diet leads to good healing and reversal of the symptoms of celiac disease. It can take a bit of learning to get good at avoiding all gliaden, however."
Source: http://www.everydayhealth.com
