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Hello, my name is Joe Murray. I'm a gastroenterologist in the Celiac Disease Program at Mayo Clinic. One of the challenges of following our patients with celiac disease is predicting whether their intestine has healed or not. We rely on a number of things: How well has the patient adhered to a gluten-free diet? Are their blood tests positive or not? How well have they been instructed on a gluten-free diet? Are their symptoms that might suggest continued damage? It turns out that most of those are really not particularly accurate. And we have ended up routinely re-biopsying most people diagnosed as adults.
We recently had the opportunity. in collaboration with investigators from California to look very carefully at a new type of test. It's called an array, peptide array test, that doesn't just look at one test, but can look at hundreds or even more tests simultaneously. And we were using this to examine the immune reactions in patients with celiac disease. Our initial work suggests that this approach might be quite accurate to diagnose celiac disease. But more importantly — or at least more relevant to our discussion today — it seemed to be a very good predictor of whether the intestine had healed or not. This is something that most studies have found — blood tests — that celiac blood tests are not particularly good at. We are hopeful if this work can be confirmed, that it would be a way to assess or predict whether there is continued damage in the intestine of a patient with treated celiac disease. Thank you.
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