Celiac Disease Four Times More Common than in 1950s

Celiac disease is over four times more common today than it was 50 years ago, according to findings of a Mayo Clinic study published in Gastroenterology. The study also found that subjects who did not know they had celiac disease were nearly four times more likely than celiac-free subjects to have died during the 45 years of follow-up.
 
“Celiac disease has become much more common in the last 50 years, and we don’t know why,” says Joseph Murray, MD, the Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist who led the study. “It now affects about one in a hundred people. We also have shown that undiagnosed or ‘silent’ celiac disease may have a significant impact on survival. The increasing prevalence, combined with the mortality impact, suggests celiac disease could be a significant public health issue.”
 
The Mayo Clinic research team tested blood samples gathered at Warren Air Force Base in 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 Olmsted County, Minn. One matched the ages of those from the 1948 to 1954 testing at the time of the blood draw, and the other matched their birth years. Researchers 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 the Wyoming participants were four times more likely to have celiac disease.
 
“Celiac disease is unusual, but it’s no longer rare,” says Murray. “Something has changed in our environment to make it much more common. Until recently, the standard approach to finding celiac disease has been to wait for people to complain of symptoms and to come to the doctor for investigation. This study suggests 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: Mayo Clinic