Part I
Dealing with the Diagnosis of Celiac Disease
In this part . . .
Being diagnosed with celiac disease is, for many people, both a shock (who wants to be told you have a disease for which there is no cure?) and a relief (knowing that with a change to your diet you can maintain good health). In this part, you find out how the diagnosis of celiac disease is made, the psychological and physical impact of the condition, and the various types of celiac disease.
Chapter 1
Finding Out You Have Celiac Disease
In This Chapter
Understanding celiac disease
Coming to terms with the diagnosis of celiac disease
Considering how celiac disease can make you feel
Treating celiac disease
Living well with celiac disease
Coping with a celiac disease diagnosis
Looking at celiac disease support groups
When you first find out that you or your loved one has celiac disease, you may be shocked. No one likes to hear bad news, and, as so often happens in this type of situation, you may recall little other than the words celiac disease from the conversation you have with your doctor that day.
Over the next few days and weeks, your mind may race non-stop as you mull over your new diagnosis and try to come to grips with it. Or, if the diagnosis is brand new to you, perhaps you are right now in the process of trying to deal with the news.
Celiac Disease For Dummies provides you not just with the facts about celiac disease, but the tools to help you master it. In this chapter, our goal is to help you understand and come to terms with your diagnosis.
Getting to Know Celiac Disease
Celiac disease, also known as celiac sprue, non-tropical sprue, and gluten-sensitive enteropathy, is a condition in which consuming gluten — a protein found in wheat, rye, barley, and some other grains — leads, in susceptible people, to damage to the lining of the small intestine, resulting in the inability to properly absorb nutrients into the body. This can lead to many different symptoms, including fatigue, malaise (feeling generally poorly), bloating, and diarrhea. Left untreated or insufficiently treated, celiac disease can lead to damage to other organs. If properly treated, celiac disease typically leads to . . . nothing!
In your travels, you may see the word celiac spelled as coeliac. Both terms refer to the same condition. Celiac is the spelling far more commonly used in North America and, hence, the spelling we use throughout this book. Incidentally, the term celiac (or coeliac) comes from the Greek word Koila, which refers to the abdomen. Doctors have known about celiac disease for a long time. Articles describing individuals suffering from diarrhea (most likely due to what we now call celiac disease) first appeared over two thousand years ago. It was, however, Dr. Samuel Gee who, in London, England in 1887, first described the condition in detail and even presciently observed that successful therapy was to be found in changing a patient’s diet.
Dealing with the Diagnosis of Celiac Disease
Perhaps you are already aware (and if you’re not, you soon will be as it is a recurring theme in this book) of the key role that a nutrient called gluten plays in triggering celiac disease. As we discuss in Chapter 2, however, although gluten triggers the condition, that’s not quite the same as saying it causes the condition.
By way of analogy, if ever you were working on your computer and you routinely pressed a key only to suddenly have your computer crash, one could appropriately say that pressing the key triggered the crash, but an underlying software glitch caused the problem in the first place.
What, then, causes celiac disease? The quick answer is we don’t know. The more complicated answer is a combination of having a susceptibility to the condition by virtue of one’s genetic make-up in conjunction with some as yet unknown environmental factor. Chapter 2 contains the full story on the cause, as best we understand it, of celiac disease.
Unless people are ill with some sort of gastrointestinal (GI) ailment, they understandably generally think little, if at all, about the incredibly complex processes involved in extracting the good from the food we eat and ridding our bodies of the stuff we don’t need. That makes sense. When celiac disease enters your life (either directly or by virtue of a family member now being affected by it), however, having some familiarity with your GI system proves beneficial. Chapter 2 explains how your GI system works when you’re healthy and how it malfunctions when you have celiac disease.
Some diseases are easy to diagnose. Tell a doctor you have spells where you see flashing lights followed by a throbbing headache, and, dollars to donuts, the doctor will quickly inform you that you may be suffering from migraine headaches.
Diagnosing celiac disease is ne...
