Please Help Interpret Bloodwork

[soulatomic]

Hi! I'm new here. What a great place for information!

Anyway, we suspected our two-year-old was gluten intolerant. We put him on a gluten-free diet and he has improved quite a bit. He hasn't been formally tested (I know, I know) because I wanted him to start feeling better (his symptoms had been present for MONTHS).

I decided to get tested (the whole genetics thing, plus my IBS-like symptoms). Here's what I got:

Immunglobulin A = 247 (range 68-378)

Tissue Transglutaminase Antibody, IgA = 5 (range 0-19)

Gliadin IgA Antibodies = 6 (range 0-19)

This means I'm negative, right? My physician said my lab work looked fine, but I wanted to see what you guys think. Please let me know if you need more info. THANK YOU!

[amy31]

Hi and welcome!

Yes, your labwork looks normal, but even if a person gets a normal blood result, this still does not guarantee that the person is not celiac, or is not intolerant to gluten. Since your child has experienced improvement on the gluten-free diet, and since you also have symptoms, you may want to do a strict gluten-free trial and see if it helps. Or, before doing that, you might choose to have additional celiac tests that were not included in your panel. It's up to you and also depends on how much you want to spend.

I ended up having a full celiac panel and only one of the tests came back positive. Of course that doesn't guarantee I have celiac disease, but the doctor thought it pointed that way and advised me to go gluten-free. I have just had to accept that I'm not ever going to really "know" if I'm celiac or not; I just want to be well! So whether or not you have a diagnosis, it is a good idea to give the diet a try and see if it resolves your problems.