A reader, mother of a celiac girl (thanks Nuria), sent us a very interesting article that talks about the European project 'Prevent Celiac Disease' (PreventCD) that planet a very significant challenge to celiac disease prevention, which as you know is gluten intolerance.
A group of experts from nine European countries work together to try to stop this food intolerance, today the most frequent in the European Union, so parents are very interested and hopeful that a way to prevent it can be found.
Previous studies gave the guideline to experts that by introducing gluten in a controlled manner during the lactation period (they point to the best time between 4 and 6 months) the risk of suffering from the disease could be halved.
Based on that, the project 'Prevent Celiac Disease' started in 2007 will have two studies, one population that will be done in Sweden (country that suffered a celiac epidemic) and another family in which will follow up 1,000 children susceptible to developing the disease, either because some of their Parents or their brother are diagnosed.
They want to analyze the relationship between the age at which gluten is introduced, in what quantities and the duration of breastfeeding since they believe that if the protein is introduced coinciding with it, it could "educate" the immune system so that it does not develop disease, something similar to the mechanism of vaccines.
If the research yields the expected results, which is what all parents want, an outreach campaign will be launched with primary prevention guidelines on what we should do to minimize as much as possible the risk of our children developing the disease.
