Can a Gluten-Free Diet Help Ataxia Patients?

Celiac.com 08/10/2017 - Gluten ataxia is defined as sporadic ataxia with positive antigliadin antibodies without an alternative cause. Gluten ataxia patients often receive MRS at baseline and again after a period on a gluten-free diet.

A research team recently set out to evaluate the effect of gluten free diet on magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) of the cerebellum in patients with gluten ataxia.

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The research team included M Hadjivassiliou, RA Grünewald, DS Sanders, P Shanmugarajah, N Hoggard. They are with the Academic Departments of Neurosciences (M.H., R.A.G., P.S.), Gastroenterology (D.S.S.), and Neuroradiology (N.H.), Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, UK.

The team included 117 consecutive patients with gluten ataxia in their report. Sixty-three followed a strict a gluten-free diet with elimination of antigliadin antibodies, 35 ate a gluten-free diet, but still tested positive for antigliadin antibodies, while 19 patients were not following a gluten-free diet.

The N-acetylaspartate (NAA)/creatine (Cr) area ratio from the cerebellar vermis increased in 62 out of 63 (98%) patients on strict a gluten-free diet, in 9 of 35 (26%) patients on a gluten-free diet, but positive antibodies, and in only 1 of 19 (5%) patients not on a gluten-free diet. The NAA/Cr ratio decreased in all 14 ataxia control patients (cerebellar variant of multisystem atrophy), while the researchers saw no differences in the MRS results between patients with celiac disease and those without.

Better NAA/Cr ratios seen on follow-up scans supports previous findings that gluten ataxia patients see clinical improvement a gluten-free diet

Such improvements can occur regardless of existing enteropathy, so patients with positive serology and negative duodenal biopsy should still maintain a strict a gluten-free diet.

Source:

• Neurology. 2017 Jul 19. pii: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000004237.doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000004237.