Stanford researcher to find cure for widespread Celi...( mptoms including chronic diarrhea abdo...),Health

mptoms including chronic diarrhea, abdominal distension, and failure to thrive. The general condition of these children is severely impaired. In many patients, symptoms may not develop until later in life when the disease presents with fatigue, diarrhea, and weight loss due to malabsorption of nutrients and vitamins, anemia and neurological symptoms.

This is a lifelong disease, and if untreated, patients have a substantially enhanced risk for the development of complications such as infertility, osteoporosis, intestinal cancer and lymphoma. There is no therapeutic option available to Celiac Sprue patients, the only treatment being a lifelong adherence to a strict gluten-free diet.

How Common Is Celiac Sprue?

Although the disease was considered uncommon until recently, the American Gastroenterological Association's most recent technical review on Celiac Sprue (Gastroenterology 120, 1526-1540, 2001) summarizes the results of several independent studies suggesting that the prevalence of the disease may be as high as 1 in 200 people in most parts of the world. Like other immune disorders such as Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, both genetic and environmental factors play a role in the onset of Celiac Sprue.

Latest Research on Celiac Sprue

Together with collaborators from the University of Oslo in Norway, Stanford researchers Chaitan Khosla and Lu Shan, a graduate student in Dr. Khosla's laboratory, recently released their latest findings about Celiac Sprue, have discovered that a relatively short fragment of the gluten protein is exceptionally toxic to Celiac Sprue patients. This gluten fragment is unusually resistant to breakdown by digestive enzymes in the intestine, where it remains intact to have a destructive effect on the intestinal lining. Using this information, they identified a bacterial enzyme (a peptidase) that can rapidly degrade this and other related toxic fragments fro
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Contact: Chaitan Khosla
csrf@celiacsprue.org
650-251-9865
Celiac Sprue Research Foundation
26-Sep-2002

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