Celiac Research UK
Coeliac UK (don’t ask me why we have to add another letter to ‘celiac’ over here!!) held its first research conference in London on December 3rd for scientists and researchers to network and report back on research they are doing at the moment.
The most exciting development, I thought, was the research being done to find a vaccine for celiac disease. Professor Bob Anderson is doing vital work here, and has discovered that ‘there are only a few dominant peptides in the gluten protein that trigger the autoimmune response in people with celiac disease, which has lead to the creation of a potential vaccine’.
They have also discovered that people with newly diagnosed celiac disease have much lower cholesterol levels than the general population - 21% lower in men and 9% lower in women.
And there is also evidence to suggest that people with celiac disease have only a third of the risk of developing breast cancer compared with the general population.
Good findings!
I thought Jamie would be pleased about this potential vaccine, if it means he can eat gluten again. I was actually quite pleased that he really wasn’t bothered at all- he has obviously come to terms with celiac disease and his new diet very well.
In fact he was slightly annoyed that some other scientist got there before him, as he wants to be a scientist when he grows up and his first ‘mission’, he tells us, will be to find a cure for celiac disease.
Guess he might have to move straight on to mission #2, which is to invent a transporter like on Star Trek…
Tags:celiac,celiac disease,celiac research
Tags: 
If you’re wondering why Coeliac is spelled this way, check this out…
http://www.celiacdisease.net/a.....r.News.pdf
“Some 8,000 years after its onset, celiac disease was identified and named. A clever Greek physician named Aretaeus of Cappadocia, living in the first century AD, wrote about “The Coeliac Affection.” In fact, he named it “koiliakos” after the Greek word “koelia” (abdomen). His description: “If the stomach be irretentive of the food and if it pass through undigested and crude, and nothing ascends into the body, we call such persons coeliacs”.
Passing through Latin, ‘k’ became ‘c’ and ‘oi’ became ‘oe’. Dropping the Greek adjectival ending ‘os’ gave us the word coeliac
Take care!!
Al