10 No symptoms
This condition is also called silent celiac disease or asymptomatic celiac disease because the patient has no evident symptoms, but will still have intestinal damage (specifically villous atrophy), so are still at risk of developing serious complications if they don’t adopt a gluten-free diet.
This makes it very difficult to diagnose and, in most cases, the patient is only diagnosed when they have a complication of the disease that cannot be explained by any other cause.
All the acute symptoms (like abdominal pain and distension) get worse after eating gluten. For example, when eating bread, pasta, and pastries. However, the chronic symptoms do not have very evident variations in their intensity.
Likewise, external factors can also vary the symptoms’ severity and age of onset. Among these factors, the following can be included: how long the patient was breast-fed as an infant, the age when the person started to eat gluten, the amount of gluten that they eat and the severity of intestinal damage.
The best treatment for celiac disease is a gluten-free diet for life. It allows control of both acute and chronic symptoms in patients of all ages.