Celiac disease, sometimes called ‘sprue‘, is an immune disorder in which the body (specifically the intestines) have an abnormal response to gluten consumption. Therefore, this disease is also defined as a gluten-sensitive enteropathy.
Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye, so when a celiac person eats any of these foods they present the typical symptoms of the disease.
It is very important to know that celiac disease can be difficult to diagnose because not all the people who suffer from it have the same symptoms or the same way of presentation. In fact, it has been demonstrated that some people can develop celiac disease since childhood while others only show the symptoms when they are adults.
There are more than 200 symptoms that can be loosely related to celiac disease, partly due to the fact that the small intestine cannot digest food and absorb some essential nutrients properly. So, the patient may have health problems in many systems and organs around the body.
However, there are 10 symptoms are more frequent than others and that is what we’ll be covering in this article. These include:
1 Abdominal pain
Although abdominal pain is a frequent symptom of celiac disease, each patient refers to pain with different characteristics. Some patients say that they feel “like a knife stab” in the lower abdomen, while others just refer bloating and discomfort. Also the same person can experience different types of pain in each stage of the disease.
The patient usually refers discomfort in the early stages and severe pain in the advanced stages.
More symptoms on next page…
