I am always jealous of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease people, why….

I have a friend with Crohn’s. While she was in the diagnostic process, we talked a little about her symptoms. She told me about blood in her stool. She said it was bad. It looked like a crime scene in the toilet because of all the blood. Ewww…..

But, she has medicine she can take to control her symptoms. Granted, her medicines aren’t without side effects, but the medicines keep her from bleeding to death.

Celiac patients don’t have anything other than a gluten free diet. I’ve alway wondered why IBD medicines aren’t tested on those with celiac disease, too. If it works for IBD, why can’t it work for celiac?

A study just came out regarding both IBD and celiac disease. The conclusion was “Patients with IBD treated using corticosteroids, 5-aminosalicylates, immunomodulators, or anti-tumor necrosis factor drugs had a lower association with celiac disease.” Which means, because they were on all of these drugs for their IBD, their celiac disease was a non-factor. I don’t have access to the whole study, so I am only reading the abstract.

In reading more and more about these options, it seems that many of these drugs have been studied with celiac patients with mixed reviews. Some say patients didn’t experience benefits or the side-effects were too intense.

Some of these drugs were tested on those with refractory celiac disease. I think refractory celiac is significantly under-diagnosed.

As I opened this study, I started looking for more and found it. But most of the drugs yielded little to no results for celiac patients.

Also, my friend has her Crohn’s under control. She is happy, healthy, and thriving! Also, I know medicines for celiac may not be for everyone and some may be happy with just the gluten free diet. I’m not. I think we can do better in a variety of ways and medications is just one area ripe for improvement and research.

Link to research article….https://academic.oup.com/ibdjournal/article-abstract/28/3/385/6277368