Who invented celiac disease

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In the early 20th century various diets were tried, with some success, but without clear recognition of the toxic components. The doctoral thesis of Wim Dicke of established that exclusion of wheat, rye and oats from the diet led to dramatic improvement. The toxicity was shown to be a protein component, referred to as gluten.

This was the true first discovery that gluten can have a profound effect on health and that physician Willem Dicke was onto something as far back as Coeliac disease while on the rise today and gluten free diets gaining popularity, this was indeed something effecting people back in World War II as well.

It is thought that the first observation of this disease was seen back in 2nd century A. Aretaeus of Cappodocia was a Greek physician first wrote about both adult and childhood coeliac disease.

As we have learned today, the only way to treat Coeliac disease is from complete avoidance of gluten itself, and that bananas do not have anything to do with the equation other than being a healthy addition to your diet. While the studied were out there proving the Coeliac disease existed, how to diagnose it was another story. The Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia wrote the first account of the disease around the first century A.

He described patients whose food passed through them without being digested, calling the disease the coeliac diathesis, stemming from the Greek word koalia , meaning abdomen. For centuries afterward, the diagnosis served as a death sentence, as no one knew the cause or any treatment.

Physicians did recognize that some patients improved, and could even gain weight, when consuming highly modified diets. Experimental nutritional regimens based on eating mainly rice, mussels or bananas achieved varying degrees of success. It would take the wartime famine to provide the final clue for how doctors could help patients with celiac disease.

Dutch pediatrician Willem-Karel Dicke had a long-standing interest in celiac disease, and in the s he encountered patients who told him their symptoms worsened after eating bread or biscuits. He suspected something related to bread was the cause of the disease. Then, when the Hunger Winter came in , Dicke saw its effects firsthand. People in the western Netherlands had to subsist on just to 1, calories each day, and sometimes even less.

The famine was severe; more than 4 million people went hungry, and between 20, and 30, died. But at the same time, Dicke realized, children with celiac disease were seeing improvement in their symptoms; some even gained weight.

It made him curious. After the famine ended along with the war in May , food supplies from the Allies, including wheat and bread, flooded back into the Netherlands.