Results for 6 year old

[Steph974]

My son was recently screened for coeliac disease due to not having gained any weight in the past 6 months, occasional constipation and stomach aches. He is also irritable and has some enamel defects on his permanent front teeth that have come through this year. His results came back negative and are: 

Tissu transglutaminase IgA level <0.1U/ml

(Reference range 0.1-3.5U/ml)

IgA 0.51 g/L
(reference range 0.27-1.95g/L)

Do you think these definitely rule out coeliac disease or is there still a chance he could have it. I would really appreciate any opinions on this. Thank you

 

 

[trents]

Yes, there is a chance he could still have celiac disease. A full celiac antibody panel was not run and that should have been done since children often do not develop antibody responses in the same pattern as adults. Really, only one celiac antibody test was done and that was the tTG-IGA. The other one is just a total antibody count to make sure the total count is not low, which can skew the other tests toward the negative range. Please read this: https://celiac.org/about-celiac-disease/screening-and-diagnosis/screening/. If you spend much time on this forum you will come to realize that most doctors are pretty ignorant about celiac disease. One of the common experiences of those in our forum community is that doctors fail to tell them they need to be eating regular amounts of gluten for 6-8 weeks before antibody testing in order for the tests to be valid. Many people are already experimenting with eliminating gluten from their diet by the time they seek medical attention.

[Scott Adams]

I just want to add that there is another condition called non-celiac gluten sensitivity that ~12% of people have for which there currently isn’t a way to test. If you end up not being able to get additional tests for celiac disease you may still want to try a gluten-free diet to see if it helps.