Gluten-free foods are in the news more
and more lately. I have written blogs about the dangers of
gluten-free foods. For people with celiac disease, which is an
autoimmune disease, they have to consume gluten-free foods. This article really scares me, as often the people that develop lymphoma
have been ignored by doctors because the doctors did not believe in
celiac disease and believed that they maybe had stomach problems
only.
Celiac disease affects approximately 3
million U.S. adults, or roughly 1 percent of the healthy adult
population in the country. The disease is an inherited autoimmune
condition. For people with celiac disease, the consumption of gluten
- a protein found in cereal grains such as wheat, rye, and barley -
causes their immune system to attack the small intestine.
If left untreated, celiac disease may
lead to complications such as osteoporosis, infertility, some brain
disorders, and even additional autoimmune conditions. In some rare
cases, undiagnosed or untreated celiac disease may also cause cancer.
A team of researchers at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC)
in the Netherlands has recently shown that the body's immune cells
triggered by the consumption of gluten in patients with celiac
disease may also lead to a rare form of lymphoma.
The findings were published in the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For a small number of people living
with celiac disease, a gluten-free diet is not enough to stop the
otherwise severe symptoms. These patients are classified as having
refractory celiac disease (RCD), which usually affects between 2 and
5 percent of celiac disease patients.
In one type of RCD called RCDII, the
white blood cells found in the wall of the small intestine divide and
multiply in excessive numbers. In approximately half of the RCDII
patients, these cells, called lymphocytes, go on to develop into a
particularly rare form of lymphoma.
This rare and very aggressive form of
white blood cell cancer is called enteropathy-associated T-cell
lymphoma.
The body's T cells - a type of immune
cell that controls the body's reaction to gluten, among other things
- have a very strong inflammatory reaction to gluten. When they
detect the protein, they produce cytokines, which in turn stimulate
other immune cells. This leads to the extremely inflammatory and
painful response typical of celiac disease, but in some rare cases,
it also leads to
cancer.
Researchers have known that the onset
of this rare form of lymphoma depends on the cytokine IL-15, which
makes malignant cells multiply. In this latest research, however,
scientists in the Netherlands have now shown that three other
cytokines - TNF, IL-2, and IL-21 - can also cause malignant cell
proliferation.
These findings serve to further clarify
how the body's immune system responds to gluten and how this can
stimulate the growth of cancerous cells in RCDII.
Dr. Lara Bennett, science
communications manager at Worldwide Cancer Research, comments on the
significance of the findings: "This is another great example of
the importance of early-stage, discovery research. This is a rare
type of cancer, but the findings could be of real benefit to this
small but important group of patients with refractory celiac
disease."
LUMC researcher and Worldwide Cancer
Research scientist, Dr. Jeroen van Bergen, explains why the next
important step in this research is identifying where exactly in the
development of lymphoma these three cytokines get involved.
"It is likely that at the time of
lymphoma diagnosis, the patient has already experienced decades of
intestinal inflammation," Dr. van Bergen says. "We need to
determine the extent to which it would actually help to block these
newly discovered growth factors with targeted drugs at the time of
diagnosis. In the meantime, we have tested a large number of
potential drugs in the laboratory, and two of them seem promising.
But this is only interesting in terms of a new treatment if these
growth factors still have a role to play in the growth and
development of the lymphoma after diagnosis."
That 2 to 5 percent of celiac patients
that develop lymphoma is still scary and the doctors that ignore
this, need his/her license revoked.
