What Really Causes Celiac Disease? - NYTimes.com

Scientists are pursuing some intriguing possibilities. One is that breast-feeding may protect against the disease. Another is that we have neglected the teeming ecosystem of microbes in the gut — bacteria that may determine whether the immune system treats gluten as food or as a deadly invader.

Celiac disease is generally considered an autoimmune disorder. The name celiac derives from the Greek word for “hollow,” as in bowels. Gluten proteins in wheat, barley and rye prompt the body to turn on itself and attack the small intestine. Complications range from diarrhea and anemia to osteoporosis and, in extreme cases, lymphoma. Some important exceptions notwithstanding, the prevalence of celiac disease is estimated to range between 0.6 and 1 percent of the world’s population.

Nearly everyone with celiac disease has one of two versions of a cellular receptor called the human leukocyte antigen, or H.L.A. These receptors, the thinking goes, naturally increase carriers’ immune response to gluten.

This detailed understanding makes celiac disease unique among autoimmune disorders. Two factors — one a protein, another genetic — are clearly defined; and in most cases, eliminating gluten from the patient’s diet turns off the disease.

Yet the more scientists study celiac disease, the more some crucial component appears in need of identification. Roughly 30 percent of people with European ancestry carry predisposing genes, for example. Yet more than 95 percent of the carriers tolerate gluten just fine. So while these genes (plus gluten) are necessary to produce the disease, they’re evidently insufficient to cause it.

Animal studies have reinforced that impression. In mice engineered to express those H.L.A.’s, tolerance to gluten must be deliberately “broken.” Without an immunological trigger of some kind, the rodents happily tolerate the protein.

A recent study, which analyzed blood serum from more than 3,500 Americans who were followed since 1974, suggested that such a trigger could strike adults at any time. By 1989, the prevalence of celiac disease in this cohort had doubled.

“You’re talking about an autoimmune disease in which we thought we had all the dots connected,” says Alessio Fasano, head of the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment at the Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston, and the senior author of the study. “Then we start to accumulate evidence that there was something else.”

Identifying that “something else” has gained some urgency. In the United States, improved diagnosis doesn’t seem to explain the rising prevalence. Scientists use the presence of certain self-directed antibodies to predict celiac disease. They have analyzed serum stored since the mid-20th century and compared it to serum from Americans today. Today’s serum is more than four times as likely to carry those antibodies.

BLAME for the increase of celiac disease sometimes falls on gluten-rich, modern wheat varietals; increased consumption of wheat, and the ubiquity of gluten in processed foods.

Yet the epidemiology of celiac disease doesn’t always support this idea. One comparative study involving some 5,500 subjects yielded a prevalence of roughly one in 100 among Finnish children, but using the same diagnostic methods, just one in 500 among their Russian counterparts.

Differing wheat consumption patterns can’t explain this disparity. If anything, Russians consume more wheat than Finns, and of similar varieties.

Neither can genetics. Although now bisected by the Finno-Russian border, Karelia, as the study region is known, was historically a single province. The two study populations are culturally, linguistically and genetically related. The predisposing gene variants are similarly prevalent in both groups.

Maybe more telling, this disparity holds for other autoimmune and allergic diseases. Finland ranks first in the world for Type 1 autoimmune diabetes. But among Russian Karelians, the disease is nearly six times less frequent. Antibodies indicative of autoimmune thyroiditis are also less prevalent, and the risk of developing allergies, as gauged by skin-prick tests, is one-fourth as common.

What’s the Russians’ secret?

“It’s a remote territory of Russia,” says Heikki Hyoty, a scientist at the University of Tampere in Finland. “They live like Finns 50 years ago.”

At the time of this research, roughly a decade ago, Russia’s per-capita income was one-fifteenth of Finland’s. Analysis of house dust and potable water suggests that the Russian Karelians encountered a greater variety and quantity of microbes, including many that were absent in Finland.

Not surprisingly, they also suffered from more fecal-oral infections. For example, three of four Russian Karelian children harbored Helicobacter pylori, a corkscrew-shaped bacterium, while just one in 20 Finnish children did. The bacterium can cause ulcers and stomach cancer, but mounting evidence suggests that it may also protect against asthma.

Professor Hyoty suspects that Russian Karelians’ microbial wealth protects them from autoimmune and allergic diseases by, essentially, strengthening the arm of the immune system that guards against such illnesses.

Meanwhile, Yolanda Sanz, a researcher at the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology in Valencia, Spain, makes a compelling case for the importance of intestinal microbes.

Years ago, Dr. Sanz noted that a group of bacteria native to the intestine known as bifidobacteria were relatively depleted in children with celiac disease compared with healthy controls. Other microbes, including native E. coli strains, were overly abundant and oddly virulent.

How to determine cause or consequence?

In a test tube, she found that those E. coli amplified the inflammatory response of human intestinal cells to gluten. But bifidobacteria switched the response from inflammation to tolerance.

In rats, the E. coli again intensified inflammation to gluten, prompting what’s sometimes called a “leaky gut” — the milieu suspected of contributing to celiac disease. Conversely, bifidobacteria protected the intestinal barrier. Microbes, it seemed, could influence the immune response to gluten.

Bifidobacteria occur naturally in breast milk, which, along with protective antibodies and immune-signaling proteins, conveys hundreds of prebiotic sugars. These sugars selectively feed certain microbes in the infant gut, particularly bifidobacteria. Breast-fed infants tend to harbor more bifidobacteria than formula-fed ones.