IMResident

Katherine, here's an article on tolerance which can be induced by ingestion of an antigen (this one pertains to the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis): Treatment of autoimmune disease by oral tolerance to autoantigens. Whitacre CC, Gienapp IE, Meyer A, Cox KL, Javed N. Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, Ohio State University College...

GFP, obviously I was kidding when I said that I am 100% croatian. I am sorry you found it disturbing. I however disagree with your opinion that most countries in Europe have a predominantly mixed heritage. That would be the case in the US as most people have parents of 2 or more different ancestries.

Wow, some people seem to be really overreacting. This is not dangerous medical advice. Going on gluten again is common in blood test positive celiacs for the gluten challange for 6 months or more without any adverse long term effects. I said she should TRY it for 2 weeks. No harm in that. Believe me this is NOT like insulin, and it's not going to kill her...

Ursula, it sounds like the gluten free diet is causing a lot of conflict with your family, and you mentioned that you are back to where you started from with regards to seeing improvement after going gluten free. Here's what I would do in your situation: I would first evaluate how you feel now and how you felt a year ago before you started the diet, including...

>Define "improve significantly"? >Certainly a large percentage of patients taking psyhctropics change significantly but that doesn't mean >they improve. They probably certainly complain less and are probably less assertive with their GP but that >doesn't mean they have "improved significantly". Improve significantly means a 50% or more...

>The numbers indicate otherwise, the numbers point more towards therapy alone or therapy AND drugs, >but not therapy OR drugs. Drugs only cover up a symptom. Without finding the cause you are just asking >for trouble. That cause could be chemical or could be phychological or both. I think this is something we can both agree on. Therapy and drugs...

You don't need lab tests to diagnose depression because it's not a disease caused by physical factors. OR I should rather say it's caused by both a combination of neurochemical and psychological factors. The psychological part of depression is just as important and many times depression is just caused by psychological factors. For example most depressed...

I don't know where you got that impression from but I am genuinly trying to help. There's a reason why I dislike enterolab so much. First, I want to tell my personal story because this might put things in perspective. So sorry but this is going to be a long post. I think you, or maybe someone else asked me what my personal interest in this board is and...

Cara, what's your definition of gluten sensitivity? Because if you tested anybody in the normal population, close to 100% would have fecal and blood antibodies against gluten, as well as transglutaminase and anti-endomysial antibodies. In low numbers but they would have them nonetheless. People also have anti-rice, anti-potatoe, anti-vegetable, anti-everything...

Actually antibodies levels decline pretty slowly (about 10% per month) so being gluten free for one or 2 months is not a problem and you can still be blood tested. All labs doing fecal antibody testing including Dr. Fine use exactly the same lab tecniques and prodcedures as in the study, so this study applies to his lab as well. To answer your second...

I want to clarify what specificity of 58% means for the fecal antibody testing. In the case of the study there were 24 people with celiac and 60 controls (completely healthy people without any intestinal or gluten sensitivity symptoms). The fecal testing found about 22 of the celiac people positive for celiac as well as about 20 of the completely healthy...

I agree with this 100% except for the fecal tests. I read the studies you mentioned. The first study supports the theoritical role for fecal secretory IgA antigliadin testing but contradicts solely antigliadin IgA testing (because of overlap between those with celiac and controls hence low specificity). The second study supports the use of the antiendomysial...

Matilda, I would like to respond to a couple of things, first of all according to the study fecal anti-gliadin/transglutaminase testing has a sensitivity in the 90s and a specificity of something like 50%, but the problem is high sensitivity in a test is useless without high specificty. It would be a completely useless screening test, despite what Dr...

I beg to differ, all my grandparents and great-grandparents on both my fathers and mothers side for 100% croatian, with maybe a little Hungarian contamination. I am not sure about what those haplotypes mean, but I am sure I have the 100% Croatian haplotype. I think celiac is a lot less common in Croatian and Eastern European populations because all we...

Most people here seem to be Irish/Swedish/German. I am 100% pure blooded Croatian .... are there any other Eastern Euros/Slavic people out there with celiac disease?