Having Biopsy

[erin24]

My blood tests are negative and my GI said he will do a biopsy if I wanted him to. I said yes. I have been gluten-free for 3 weeks. I have 2 weeks until the endoscopy. So, will it even come back positive or negative since I have been gluten-free for 3 weeks?

Also, I asked the nurse (who admitted she didn't know much about Celiac) if I needed to go back on gluten for the next 2 weeks since I have been gluten-free for the past 3 weeks she said "If you have Celiac, you have it, no matter if you have been gluten-free, so it is my choice whether to eat gluten or not"!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, I am no a doctor but isn't that completely wrong? If I have been gluten-free for 3 weeks and my intestines heal then it will show up as no damage and therefore negative on the endo, right?

I mean seriously, am I wasting my time here dealing with these drs and doing this endoscopy? Basically, how I feel is that this guy probably doesn't even know what to look for when he does the endoscopy.

[RoseNNJ]

I had my Biopsy and getting the reults on Thursday. I was told to eat Gluten 7-10 days before the test. Which totaly sucked! I don't know if that was long enough. He sent me for the Celiac Panel being 3 weeks gluten-free, and it was Negative.

[dlp252]

I don't know if it's a complete waste of time, but it definitely might not show anything. My doctor ran a celiac blood panel even though I've been gluten-free for 4 months...he agreed that it probably wouldn't show anything, but said we could run it to have some baseline numbers for reference down the road.

I was scheduled for a colonoscopy (the reason I was seeing him in the first place), and he wanted to do an endoscopy as well (at the same time)...in my case it was to check for damage from GERD, but he said while he was in there he would do a biopsy to check for celiac damage...again more of a baseline, than actually expecting to find much I think.

In the end I don't know what benefit the baseline numbers might provide other than to see at some point down the road how things are progressing or worsening for me. And, I'm not sure if we weren't doing the endoscopy anyway if I would have opted for that just to check for damage after having been gluten-free so long.

[plantime]

Whether or not damage will show will depend on how severe it was to begin with. I don't think 3 weeks is long enough for bad damage to be reversed, but it will depend on how bad it was. You can eat gluten for next two weeks, just in case, then go gluten-free after the testing. It is usually not recommended to be gluten-free before testing, to avoid false negatives as much as possible.