By Josephine Marcotty
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
(MCT)
The findings contradict the prevailing belief that a sharp increase in diagnoses of wheat gluten intolerance has come about because of greater awareness and detection, and raises questions about whether dramatic changes in the American diet have played a role.
"It's become much more common," said Dr.
"Fifty years is way too fast for human genetics to have changed," Murray said. "Which tells us it has to be a pervasive environmental influence."
Researchers at the
Today an estimated 1 out of 100 people suffer from the inherited disorder, though most of the time people don't know they have it.
The disease occurs in people whose bodies cannot digest gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye and barley. The undigested protein triggers the body's immune system to attack the lining of the small intestine, causing diarrhea, nausea, and abdominal pain. Though people live with it for many years, over time it destroys the lining of the small intestine, leading to an inability to absorb nutrients such as iron and calcium. That, in turn, causes serious conditions, including anemia, osteoporosis and even infertility in both men and women.
The only treatment is a gluten-free diet — no wheat, rye or barley.
Murray said he initiated the study to find out whether the disease is on the rise, and whether it had long-term health consequences if undiagnosed and untreated.
He turned to medical archeology to find the answers — a treasure-trove of blood samples taken from recruits at the
One of the doctors in that study took some of the samples with him when he moved the
"Nobody has anything like it," said Kaplan. "There are other collections, but none go back this far."
In 2000 they were used to help resolve an intense debate among researchers over whether Hepatitis C infection was a certain death sentence, or whether many people could live with it for years.
Murray used a similar design for the study on Celiac disease, published today in the journal Gastroenterology. He tested more than 9,133 samples for the antibodies that proved the recruits had Celiac disease; 43, or about one out of 652, had the disease. He then tested blood samples from groups of men from
His findings raise questions about why the number of people with the disease has grown so fast. But rates of other immune diseases have also increased a lot. One theory is that modern, clean living, which has resulted in fewer infections, parasites and microbes in our bodies, causes the immune system to turn on healthy tissue instead. Or it may also be the modern diet, Murray said.
"The types of food we eat now are different," he said.
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