Celiac Disease and kids and Coeliac Disease in children

The symptoms of celiac disease in children generally become apparent three to five months after first consuming foods that contain gluten, although for a few cases the interval may be as short as one month.
Several of the experts who advise on infant health say solid foods should not be introduced to a baby’s diet until almost five months old and gluten-containing cereal should be avoided during the first six months of life.
Older children with more subtle symptoms of poor appetite, poor growth, and anemia are more difficult to diagnose because there are many other reasons for the lack of growth in childhood.
Clinical symptoms often diminish or disappear during puberty [adolescence], although biochemical or morphological abnormalities of the celiac condition may persist. More active symptoms will reappear again in early adulthood, after the period in which the immune system appears to “give more of their attention” to sexual development.
While the adolescent may feel that he or she has “grown out of the disease,” the actuality is that the condition continues and must [should] be treated with the same strict gluten free diet.
As a part of my ongoing series of videos on Celiac Disease, below you will find a video with me, Paul Smith, talking about Celiac disease and Children

Best Regards

Paul Smith

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There are several tests that can be used to assist in diagnosis.

The level of symptoms may determine the order of the tests, but all tests lose their usefulness if the patient is already taking a gluten-free diet.

Intestinal damage begins to heal within weeks of gluten being removed from the diet, and antibody levels decline over months.

For those who have already started on a gluten-free diet, it may be necessary to perform a re-challenge with 10 g of gluten (four slices of bread) per day over 26 weeks before repeating the investigations. Those who experience severe symptoms (e.g. diarrhoea) earlier can be regarded as sufficiently challenged and can be tested earlier. Combining findings into a prediction rule to guide use of endoscopy reported a sensitivity of 100% (it would identify all the cases) and specificity of 61% (it would be incorrectly positive in 39%).

The prediction rule recommends that patients with high risk symptoms or positive serology should undergo endoscopy. The study defined high risk symptoms as weight loss, anaemia (haemoglobin less than 120 g/l in females and less than 130 g/l in males), or diarrhoea (more than three loose stools per day).

This is a video with myself talking through my views.

Best regards
Paul Smith.

glutenfreehealth.net

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