From GI & Hep News: Celiac Disease Associated with 2.5-fold Risk of Neuropathy

Here’s an excerpt:

The use of Swedish population registries enabled first author Dr. Sujata P. Thawani of Columbia University, New York, and her colleagues to find that the risk of neuropathy was increased both before and after a diagnosis of celiac disease (CD).

“We found an increased risk of neuropathy in patients with CD that persists after CD diagnosis. Although absolute risks for neuropathy are low, CD is a potentially treatable condition with a young age of onset. Our findings suggest that screening could be beneficial in patients with neuropathy,” they wrote (JAMA Neurol. 2015 May 11 [doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2015.0475]).Neuropathy has a known association with CD, an immune-mediated disorder characterized by sensitivity to gluten with an incidence of about 1% in Western Europe…

Dr. Thawani and her associates used Swedish pathology registers to identify individuals whose small intestine biopsies showed villous atrophy between 1969 and 2008 (Marsh stage 3, n = 28,232)…Each CD patient was matched with up to five age- and sex-matched controls (n = 139,473) from the Swedish Total Population Registry, all of whom were diagnosed in the same year and were from the same county as the matched CD patient. 

Although 41.7% of CD patients were diagnosed in childhood, the median age at diagnosis was 29 years…

Surveillance bias may account for some of the increased risk for neuropathy…Notably, though, patients with a prior neuropathy diagnosis also were more likely to be diagnosed with CD, showing a bidirectional relationship. 

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