Treatments for Celiac Disease

What would be your perimeters on embracing a treatment for Celiac disease?  Would you be willing to try anything?  Or is there a limit to what you would do as a treatment for Celiac disease.

In case you had not heard, Alvine Pharmaceuticals, who is in the process of developing a possible drug for celiac disease.  (Check out the  information in my post:  Celiac Drug in Trial Test)  Since publishing my original post in May, the list of drugs in testing has increased:

• Alvine Pharmaceuticals’ ALV003 — making great progress

• ImmusanT’s Nexvax2 — potential vaccine

• Alba Therapeutics Corp.’s AT-1001 — suffered lots of setbacks in trials

• BioLineRx’s BL-7010 — testing and expecting to release results early 2014

Although, most of these treatments may only help in the case of cross-contamination, any, all or none of these may turn out to be the next step in treatment for celiac disease.

But what about non-conventionally treatments?

According to Jane Anderson, About.com Celiac Disease and Gluten Intolerance expert, Hookworms may be another treatment for Celiac Disease:

Can Hookworm Infection Cure Celiac?

In a paper published earlier this week in the International Journal for Parasitology, the group reported on trials in which they purposely infected celiac disease patients with the hookworm Necator americanus. The results were intriguing, to say the least.

The experiment, conducted in Australia, involved volunteers with celiac disease who agreed to be infected with the hookworms and then undergo a gluten challenge to measure their responses. Half of the people were infected with hookworms, and the remainder served as the control group.

The researchers found that hookworm infection did alter the volunteers’ responses to gluten: part of the inflammatory response in the small intestine was suppressed during the gluten challenge, but other measures of an inflammatory response appeared to rise following the challenge.

Having a treatment for celiac disease would be wonderful, but a hookworm?  Would you consider such a treatment?

Here is the response to date to Jane’s question:  Would you consider playing host to a hookworm to treat your celiac disease?

23% — In a heartbeat – bring on my worms!

42% — Maybe – I’d have to look at the research

34% — Ewwww, no!

What are your thoughts?  Personally, I would rather just not eat gluten, but then I am one of the lucky people who is not super sensitive!

Time will tell if the drug trials come up with something that will work with little to no side effects!