Can Celiac Disease Affect the Brain? | Hacker News Reader

Can Celiac Disease Affect the Brain?

nytimes.com

51 pointsmolecule14 comments

We discussed an earlier article by this author once before on Hacker News, which I recall submitting. I was actually embarrassed after submitting the article to find out that the author pushes his guesses beyond what current research shows and that scientists who work on the same problems mostly don't endorse his conclusions. You'll note, as I should have noted last time, that this New York Times column is an OPINION column, not a reporter's article about established facts. If you read this opinion piece the same way that Malcolm Gladwell encourages his readers to read his essays (as a prompt for further thinking, not claiming that he has the last word), then maybe no harm, no foul, but please be wary of making important health decisions for yourself without gathering second opinions on ideas like this.

That this is an opinion piece is made obvious by Betteridge's Law:

> "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

I recall that "Betteridge's Law," which I see from the Wikipedia citations is a new and not particularly widespread idea, was promoted here in the Hacker News community by the site founder and former chief site curator, pg (Paul Graham). While I will agree with the proposition that many articles titled with a yes/no question invite the easy answer no, I don't think that is an invariant property of all such articles. I think it's too cheap and easy on the part of the learned readers here to simply invoke "Betteridge's Law" without reading an article deeply and grappling with more of the article's argument than the article's headline. (That's especially true because sometimes headlines are chosen by editors of a publication, while the text of the article is chosen by the article's author.) I've already indicated that I am not sure I should accept the argument of this article (which brings up issues that are already familiar to me from other reading), but I also am very sure that we shouldn't dismiss every article submitted here with a yes/no question in its title before we read the fine article.

I think it's more of a joke "law" meant to discourage lazy click-bait headline-writing.

My girlfriend has Celiac's disease, and she was diagnosed about 3 months after we started dating. Before her diagnosis I often wondered if she had some sort of mental illness because she would always describe having out-of-body experiences where she subjectively witnessed herself doing things in third person.

After she was diagnosed and went gluten free, there was an acute "rebound" phase where she had very painful rashes like the article mentions. But she also had a lot more energy and no longer slept 12 hours a day. The symptoms that made me worry about mental illness completely went away within a few weeks of her going gluten free.

This is all anecdotal but it seems very plausible that gluten can cause brain lesions in those with Celiac's.

As a fellow coeliac I have also had those experiences, no idea what caused them but they went away with the gluten free diet.

After being gluten free for 10 years now it's so easy to tell when I've eaten something that contains gluten.

A daughter of a friend's family friend was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was sent to stay with a sister in the country, where she went on a gluten free diet. The schizophrenia miraculously went away.

One of the quoted scientists, Dr. Fasano, discovered a protein called zonulin [1] responsible for mediating the permeability of cells in the gut, with possible implications for gut-involved autoimmune diseases. He authored a fascinating (so far, it's long!) review article on the subject, freely accessible [2].

The original article hints at one potential etiology for gluten's neurological effects:

antibodies directed at gliadin, a gluten protein, could cross-react with proteins in the brain. The finding suggests that, by some coincidence, certain proteins on neurons structurally resemble proteins in wheat. Meaning that, if your immune system attacks gluten, it might also inadvertently pursue brain tissue.

Interestingly, gliadin also activates the zonulin pathway. There is drug trial underway to target that pathway, now reportedly past the phase 2 (efficacy and safety) stage in 300 patients [3].

Another possible neurological tie-in is myelin. Myelin is a lipid sheath surrounding axons, very roughly analogous to cable insulation. De-myelination is involved in several autoimmune neurological diseases, including multiple-sclerosis. There are several proposed mechanisms referenced in [2], and recent work has suggested at least a weak association between celiac disease and multiple-sclerosis [4]. Since the original article also mentions schizophrenia, it is worth pointing out that de-myelination has also been suggested as a factor in some schizophrenic pathologies.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonulin [2] http://physrev.physiology.org/content/91/1/151.long [3] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alba-therapeutics-an... [4] http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2377/11/31

The idea's unfortunately been picked up by the fringier side of the discussion, but there's evidence that some proteins in wheat (not just gluten) trigger opiate receptors in the brain.

- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1309704

- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6099562

Some suggest that avoiding gluten is a good idea with other autoimmune diseases too.

Could you point me to some sources? I'm very interested in this.

Sorry I am answering late.

One is this author suggesting removal of Gluten for MS: http://www.jandevrieshealth.co.uk/health_matters.asp?int_ser...

There is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20170845 but it is apparently controversial(?)

No apology needed! Thanks so much for digging up some info. I have a family member struggling with an autoimmune disease and any bit of info I can work with is helpful.

I will after work today.

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