Original ResearchFull Report: Clinical—Alimentary TractHigh Proportions of People With Nonceliac Wheat Sensitivity Have Autoimmune Disease or Antinuclear Antibodies
Section snippets
Study Design and Population
The study was divided into 2 different parts: a retrospective evaluation and a prospective survey. In the first, the clinical charts of NCWS patients attending the outpatient centers of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University Hospital of Palermo and the Department of Internal Medicine of the Hospital of Sciacca were reviewed with a retrospective method. They had all been diagnosed with NCWS between January 2001 and June 2011 and included in a previously published study.12 These
Patient Clinical Characteristics
After the exclusion of the incomplete clinical records in which some data were lacking and exclusion of the data of the patients who had tested positive for EmA antibodies in the culture of the duodenal mucosa, 131 NCWS patients of the retrospective cohort were included (see Supplementary Material). Tables 1 and 2 show the clinical characteristics of the patients included in the retrospective and in the prospective studies, respectively, in comparison with the control groups. In general, in
Discussion
NCWS is an emerging clinical condition that, in the last few years, has attracted the interest of researchers.6, 13 There are considerable data, including from the current study, that seem to indicate that it is a sex-related disease, with a much higher frequency in females.9, 12, 14 However, the lack of a diagnostic marker for NCWS is the main problem in identifying patients. In addition, after basing the diagnosis on DBPC challenge, many clinical characteristics still remain to be defined,
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Ms Carole Greenall, BA, MCIL, for revising the text.
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Anemia in non-celiac wheat sensitivity: Prevalence and associated clinical and laboratory features
2023, Digestive and Liver DiseaseCitation Excerpt :This multicenter study was designed to: 1) evaluate the prevalence, severity, and morphological features of anemia in NCWS patients; 2) identify the possible pathogenetic aspects (i.e., iron, vitamin B12, and folate metabolism, thyroid hormones, autoimmune gastric processes) and 3) investigate the effects of a WFD. In line with the literature [10,11,16] and our previous studies [15,18,23], NCWS patients were mainly young (third to fourth decade of life) females diagnosed with a significant delay (60 (0–612) months), likely because of the lack of diagnostic biomarkers for this condition. The clinical presentation was not only IBS-like, but also dyspepsia-like.
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Conflicts of interest The authors disclose no conflicts.
Funding This study was supported in part by the University of Palermo (grant 2012 ATE 0491 “Gluten Sensitivity and IBS” and in part by the Italian Foundation for Celiac Disease (AIC) Grant for Project 013 2014.
Author names in bold designate shared co-first authorship.