History of Gluten Sensitivity

[IBman2015]

Hello, I am assigned to write an Extended Essay for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and I am looking to base my topic off of the history of either gluten sensitivity or Celiac's Disease. I am looking to argue that the consumption of gluten itself does not cause gluten sensitivity or Celiac's Disease (some argue that the genetic modification of gluten causes it) and that the rise in gluten sensitivity and Celiac's is similar to that of the rise of other allergies (i,e, peanuts, certain dyes, etc.). I am asking currently what your thoughts may be about this and if it is at all possible that you know any journals, books, etc that could help me in my research. Thank you for your time.

[rktpro]

I once read somewhere that the body makes antibodies against gluten. It feels as if gluten is harmful. My friend just yesterday went for a test to check if he were allergic to gluten. Maybe, you could research more on the medical tests.

[chadn737]

Go to Google Scholar or PubMed and search for these terms. Avoid the hypochondriac websites from non-experts that are the typical top hits of a standard google search. Restrict yourself to the actual evidence. The papers on this subject will be scattered around in different journals, so you really need to use one of the above search engines to find them.

[IBman2015]

Thank you for the help!

[CharonY]

I once read somewhere that the body makes antibodies against gluten. It feels as if gluten is harmful. My friend just yesterday went for a test to check if he were allergic to gluten. Maybe, you could research more on the medical tests.

 

Just because your body produces against something does not mean that it is actually harmful. Autoimmune diseases are caused by the body creating antibodies against itself, for example. Take Chadn737's advice. I would recommend starting off with reviews (in the various search engines, including pubmed you can often filter for them) to give an overview about the topic.

[overtone]

If you are looking into the history of the disorder itself, rather than the medical recognition or handling of it, you will need to be careful of the dates of the published research you use - the scientific view of immune system functioning in the development of food allergies has changed radically in recent years.

[CharonY]

I think the basic underlying mechanisms have been well-researched for decades and while there are incremental changes I am not aware of something radical. If you are thinking about prevalence of food allergies, risk assessment and risk mitigation the question is still quite open (some some progress is being made in understanding the role of immunoexclusion and immunosupression mechanisms to module inflammatory responses. Again, advances rather than radical changes.

[overtone]

 

 

I think the basic underlying mechanisms have been well-researched for decades and while there are incremental changes I am not aware of something radical.

Whether one would regard the changes in the science as incremental or radical, I couldn't say - but it wasn't very long ago that docs were advising pregnant women to avoid eating peanuts and keep their baby's environment as clean as possible, to reduce the risk of allergy development - which is now thought to be exactly the wrong thing to do. That's kind of radical from the layman's point of view.

[CharonY]

That is what I meant, the advice the MDs are giving advice based on risk assessment on incomplete data because a) they have no other option and b) they generally are only peripherally if at all involved in the ongoing research of mechanisms.

This risk assessments tend to be based on epidemiological data that are occasionally cross-fed by molecular information. As such, it is obviously not that the scientific view of system immune function that has been changed but rather the medical advice that is being derived from what we know. Both are quite different beasts.

[physica]

Remember to think outside the box on this subject. It’s very easy to focus on the mechanism of the disease when writing these essays. No doubt you will be looking at numbers of gluten sensitive or Celiac patients and how it’s increased. What I always have to remind my students is to think of why these numbers have increased. As I don’t want to write this for you I’ll give you some other medical examples that illustrate fallacies that students easily fall for.

 

Testing: as science progresses testing becomes more accurate, cheaper and the general public become educated. A prime example would be diabetes. Symptoms for diabetes include increased lethargy and increased urination. Back in the day an elderly patient would simply put these symptoms down to age however, we now offer routine screening for patients over a certain age so it’s no wonder that diabetes figures are going to go up. Considering this you have to take the increase claims with a pinch of salt because we don’t know how many people were walking around with undiagnosed diabetes before the improvement and drive for testing.

 

Everybody has to die of something one day: this may seem obvious but I’ve come across many a patient and student concerned about the increase in cancer rates. It has to be noted that heart disease was the biggest killer and cause of disability in the UK. We then made breakthroughs with the statin, emergency PCI intervention for heart attacks and HDL and LDL cholesterol ratios. Heart disease decreased and in-turn cancer increased. This meant that patients who would usually die of a heart attack survived them and then sat around waiting for something else to kill them which was cancer. An increase in numbers doesn’t always mean an increase whatever is causing the disease. It could just mean that there are more people living long enough to get cancer.

 

Deception: now I detest conspiracy theorists as much as the next guy but you still have to be careful. I’m not saying that medical institutions make up data but we have to acknowledge that they want funding so repackaging data is common. Keep a look out for definitions. Some cancer studies classify a life saved by the intervention as increasing the life by 3 years, others by eradicating the cancer and others will classify a life saved by increasing the life expectancy by a couple of months. Certain charities or institutes reply on funding so they may exaggerate their cause and make out that the problem they are tackling is bigger than it is.

 

Now these points shouldn’t be the main focus of your essay at all but consider them as limitations to the sources that you cite to add an extra level of analysis to your paper. Good luck

[chadn737]

I am very suspect of a lot of claims of gluten sensitivity for two reasons. 1) I've seen a lot of hypochondriacs claim gluten allergies or other things. 2) It has become part of a health food craze with expensive specialized foods and innumerable websites claiming miraculous benefits of gluten-free diets coupled with conspiracist claims regarding wheat and its evils.

 

Is it real? Yes. Is it a major problem? I don't know. Its like all the peanut and nut allergies that every other person seems to have now.