How common is celiac disease? At one time, medical students were taught that only one person in 5,000 had this condition in which a reaction to gluten damages the intestinal lining. Gluten, a protein in wheat, barley and rye, can trigger non-specific symptoms such as joint pain, anemia or fatigue in susceptible people as a consequence. A survey of 7,800 Americans used blood tests to find that 35 of these had celiac disease. That works out to a rate of one in one hundred Caucasians. The majority were unaware that they were sensitive to gluten. The treatment for celiac disease is to avoid gluten in the diet.
The People's Perspective on Medicine