MC and Celiac

[jmayk8]

http://www.celiac.com/articles/22610/1/ ... Page1.html

[tex]

Jenny,

I see that's a new study. They showed only about a 5% overlap between the two diseases, (40 out of 763). An Australian study, done almost 10 years ago, found that 40% of the patients with CC, who had a small intestinal biopsy, also had celiac disease, (4 out of 10).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1401208

The Australian study was much smaller, so it doesn't carry the confidence level of a larger study, but I wonder if the key difference between the results of the two studies might be that not all of the MC cohort in the Canadian study had been subjected to an upper endoscopy with biopsies. If the researchers were just looking at hospital diagnostic records, then not all of the MC patients would have had an upper endoscopy exam, with biopsies, and if they didn't, then even if they happened to have celiac disease, there's no way that they could have been diagnosed, without the biopsies, so they would have been missed, in the study.

The fact that they found that middle-aged women were most likely to have both diseases, makes me suspicious, because it brings to mind the age-old problem of only "looking for MC" in women of a specific age group. IOW, by the same token, patients outside of that demographic may not have been as likely to have had an upper endoscopy with biopsies, thus preventing them from being diagnosed with concurrent celiac disease.

That would have been a stupid mistake on the part of the researchers, but as we all know, researchers make stupid mistakes every day.

Tex



Tex

[MBombardier]

I am confident, based on my fecal fat absorption number value and my family history, that I have celiac disease, and feel no need of an endoscopy to prove it, since it wouldn't change anything that I do or eat. So I would have been missed in this study.