In patients with celiac disease, the presence of a protein called gluten in wheat, barley, rye, and possibly oats triggers an immune system attack that can damage the villi in the small intestine and cause a variety of symptoms, such as diarrhea, anemia, and abdominal discomfort. Now scientists are wondering, Why is celiac disease four times more common today than it was 50 years ago?

     According to Joseph Murray, M.D., a gastroenterologist from the Mayo Clinic who led a recently reported research study, scientists don't know the reason for the increase in the incidence of celiac disease. He says, "Something has changed in our environment to make it much more common." He adds, "It now affects about one in a hundred people."
   

     The Mayo Clinic researchers studied blood samples gathered from 9,133 healthy adults at the Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming, between 1948 and 1954, for the antibody that people with celiac disease produce in reaction to gluten. They compared those blood test results with those from two recently collected sets from 12,768 gender-matched subjects from a study in Olmsted County, Minnesota, who were analyzed for signs of celiac disease. They found that young people today are 4.5 times more likely to have celiac disease than young people were in the 1950s, while those whose birth years matched those of the Warren Air Force Base participants were four times more likely to have celiac disease.

     Refuting "what you don't know can't hurt you," the researchers found that subjects who did not know that they had celiac disease were nearly four times more likely than celiac-free subjects to have died during the 45 years of follow-up.

     Dr. Murray points out, "Some studies have suggested that for every person who has been diagnosed with celiac disease, there are likely 30 who have it but are not diagnosed." He says that part of the problem is that celiac disease symptoms are variable and can be mistaken for other diseases that are more common, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

     Dr. Murray adds that the study results suggest that "we may need to consider looking for celiac disease in the general population, more like we do in testing for cholesterol or blood pressure."

--Source: "Celiac Disease Four Times More Common than in 1950s," Mayo Clinic, June 29, 2009; and "Celiac Disease Becoming More Common," Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times Well blog, July 2, 2009