Does Villi Regrowth Cause Pain?

[LindsayRae329]

I was wondering if anyone knows if it hurts when your villi start to grow back. I was diagnosed at the end of Sep. 2010 and my only symptom was a distended abdomen. I have stuck to a gluten free diet from day one and my belly didn't go down at all. It started to go down in December and then popped back up in January. I'm almost as positive as I can be that I wasn't glutened by anything. I've been super careful about everything that I eat.

For the past couple of weeks every time I eat my insides feel sort of sore. My belly went down a couple inches and now it hurts a little more than it did before. I was just wondering that since the pain is more prevalent when the swelling goes down if it could just mean that my villi are growing back and it hurts because my body isn't used to it or something. I have read that it can take a while for gluten to fully get out of your system so I'm just wondering if after about 4 months on a gluten-free diet it's finally out of my system and the healing has begun. Please let me know if anyone else has experienced pain that was caused by actual healing and not contamination or something. Thanks!

[WheatChef]

No, the regrowth of the villi will not cause pain. Since you are experiencing pain 4 months into the diet that means you're either eating things with gluten in them (cross contamination is really common in the beginning), or you're picking up an infection which is another not so uncommon thing seeing as how your internal bacteria were out of whack even before you started opening up more "real estate" through the healing process. Try taking probiotics.

As far as the belly goes, gluten isn't the only thing that causes the buddha belly. Most of the times it's a "carb belly" instead of just a gluten belly.