by Elise Wachspress
While we often think of our immune cells as fighting the good fight against bacteria, viruses, and our own rogue cells (as in cancer), the system is sometimes reacting to specific dietary antigens, chemical toxins and even healthy tissue it mistakenly perceives to be dangerous microbes. We’ve long called bread “the staff of life,” but there are some people whose immune systems think of it more like an incitement to all-out war.
For those with celiac disease, the immune army resident in the gut sets their weapons against gluten, a protein in the seeds of wheat and other grains. In the celiac gut, the “heat of battle” plays out as serious inflammation of the villi, the “little fingers” of the small intestine that facilitate nutrient absorption. And because wheat is such a staple of our diets—far more than just the main ingredient in our daily bread and beer, but also a thickener in soy sauce, imitation meats, ice cream, ketchup, and even cosmetics and hair products—the immune cells of people with celiac are pretty much fighting this battle all the time.
Luckily, there are now good tests for celiac disease, and, in most who follow a gluten-free diet, the immune system activation stops, and the villi can heal.
This research, led by Bana Jabri, MD, PhD, and postdoctoral fellow Toufic Mayassi, PhD, now at Harvard/MIT’s Broad Institute, along with a host of scientists (immunologists, gastroenterologists, chemists, geneticists, and molecular biologists) from Chicago, Wales, the Netherlands, and Australia, suggests that patients with celiac disease may at higher risk of cancer and infections, especially if they were diagnosed as adults.
This research also encourages families of patients with celiac to proactively seek screening for the disease. Recent research by the Mayo Clinicfound that 44 percent of close relatives of celiac patients also test positive for the disease, even though they show no or atypical symptoms. The UChicago team findings accentuate the importance of testing close relative of celiac patients—to preserve the long-term immune flexibility of their gut cells.
This research also suggests more universal vulnerabilities for all of us: that constant inflammation can permanently reconfigure our immune cell population and increase our disease risk, providing ample reason for an anti-inflammatory diet of fruits, vegetables, nuts, fatty fish, and red wine—besides the fact that these are just plain delicious.
The esteemed journal Cell found this research so compellingly important that they invited Jabri and Mayassi to submit a video explanation—just more research coming out of the Jabri lab that identifies her as one of the world’s leading experts of both on celiac disease and the immune response in general.
