Bone Pain

Gluten Free Homemade Challah Bread

This is a quote that a lot of people are hearing these days. What happens after your doctor says these words? Here is a synopsis of my journey; if any of this sounds familiar, give it some serious thought…there may be a very simple answer.

I first heard these words while I was barely concious, in a bed at Methodist Hospital in Houston. I had become so weak and debilitated by my undiagnosed and untreated celiac disease that my life was in danger. The symptoms over twenty years included gastrointestinal problems, fibromyalgia, irritability, bone pain and more. The good news was that I finally found out what was wrong with me; the better news was finding out that the disease is completely manageable through dietary changes alone.–no medications, no surgeries, none of that stuff. Just don’t eat grains that contain the gluten protein, mainly wheat, barley and rye. That sounded really good to me.

Not so fast. While still in the hospital, I was really still very sick, and not really able to process the information. After a couple of days (in which I was already improving), it dawned on me that Read More »

Research shows celiac disease can cause brittle bones in children. Can a gluten-free diet correct it?

A teenage gymnast is completing an exercise at the US Nationals gymnastics competition. At seventeen years of age, she is one of the top athletes in the country, physically strong and incredibly fit.

Both her wrists fracture during the dismount.

Doctors test her bone density to find out why her bones broke so easily. Although she is just a teenager, she is diagnosed with osteopenia, the precursor to osteoporosis and a bone disorder that normally afflicts people over 55. She has never had gastrointestinal issues, but her doctors test her for celiac disease anyway because something is obviously wrong with the way she is absorbing and/or metabolizing calcium. Read More »

Osteomalacia is common in celiac disease. Osteomalacia can occur at any age. It children, it is called rickets.  It is a metabolic bone disorder that involves slow loss of minerals from bone tissue throughout the skeleton, stemming from inadequate absorption of vitamin D. As minerals are dissolved from bone tissue to provide for essential functions elsewhere in the body, bones gradually lose their hardness.

Consequently, pronounced softening of the bones characterizes osteomalacia. Soft bones become deformed, especially bones of the arms, legs, spine, thorax and pelvis. The softer bones have a normal amount of collagen, a strong fibrous protein in the bone matrix (osteoid) that gives bone its structure and tensile capacity, but there is not sufficient calcium and phosphate minerals available to properly mineralize or be deposited in the osteoid to give it necessary hardness. Read More »

Dr. Rodney Ford, pediatrician and author of The Gluten Syndrome, provides us with an excellent and easy-to-follow video that tells us how to know if we need a gluten test.

This short presentation explains which symptoms to look for and tells you the tests you need to to request to find out if gluten is making you sick.

Dr. Ford estimates up to one third of people with chronic diseases are being affected by gluten and sums up why people do not ask to be tested. “We are so used to being sick that we don’t know we’re sick.” People think they have always been this way, so they do not know to ask.

He then establishes a great litmus test to determine who should be tested – “People who are sick, tired or grumpy should be tested.”

Read More »

The article below describes a study showing if a woman enters menopause with a low bone mineral density, the risk is 25% to develop fractures compared to 9% who had normal bone mineral density. This is a significant and important reason for women with celiac disease to: 

1) Keep a strict gluten-free diet to be able to absorb calcium, vitamin D and other nutrients vital to bone health,  

2) Influence disinterested relatives to get tested, and 

3) Get a baseline bone mineral density (BMD) test with follow-up for the appropriate supplementation.

Bone Density Tests Do Predict Women’s Fracture Risk
Largest, longest study ever supports screening and prevention of osteoporosis

By Amanda GardnerPosted 12/18/07

TUESDAY, Dec. 18 (HealthDay News) — One bone mineral density test can accurately predict a woman’s chance of spinal fractures 15 years down the line, new research shows.

And, according to the largest and longest prospective study of osteoporosis ever, women who had a spinal fracture at the beginning of the study had four times the risk of sustaining another fracture later on.

The bottom line: “Women need to talk to their doctors about the risk of osteoporosis,” according to Jane Cauley, lead author of the study and professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

Her team published the findings in the Dec. 19 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“I agree with the guidelines that all women after the age of 65 have bone density tests, and Medicare will pay for that,” Cauley said. “Women who are postmenopausal, 50 to 64 years of age, should consider having a bone density test if they have other risk factors for osteoporosis or if they want to know what their bone density is before they consider any other treatment.”

The findings don’t change current standard practice, experts said, and they don’t change the basic message to women: Don’t ignore bone health, especially in middle and old age.

“The only really major advance here is that it’s a longer term study. Mostly studies are five years typically. This one went out 15 years,” said Paul Brandt, associate professor of neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in College Station. “Women need to get their bone mineral density tested after they start menopause and if they stay on hormone replacement therapy or an anti-osteoporotic treatment.” he said.

Postmenopausal women are particularly vulnerable to fractures resulting from osteoporosis, a degenerative weakening of the bones. Some 10 million Americans, including one in five American women over the age of 50, suffer from osteoporosis, which is the most common type of bone disease.

Spinal fractures are the most common type of fracture resulting from osteoporosis, affecting 35 percent to 50 percent of women over 50 (about 700,000 vertebral fractures annually in the

United States).
But many, if not most, of these fractures go undetected. “Osteoporosis is sometimes called the silent thief,” Cauley said. “It basically robs the skeleton of strength and resources, and women don’t really know about it. About 75 percent of all spine fractures actually occur silently.”

“Identifying risk factors for spine fractures is less well developed. You have to systematically look for them by repeated X-rays,” Cauley continued.

The findings from this study are based on bone mineral density data from 2,300 women over the age of 65 who enrolled in the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), initiated in 1986.

After 15 years of follow-up, it was evident that 25 percent of women who had low BMD at the beginning of the study developed fractures of the spine, compared with only 9 percent of women with normal BMD.

“It was pretty much a strong gradient of risk,” Cauley explained. “If you had normal bone density when you entered and did not have an [existing] fracture, the risk of having a new spine fracture was about 9 percent, compared to a risk of 56 percent in women who had osteoporosis and who had an existing fracture. So, the range of risk varied dramatically depending on bone density and previous spine fractures.”

According to Brandt, one interesting finding from the study is that a previous vertebral fracture topped even bone mineral density as a predictor for future fracture.

This indicates that women with an existing vertebral fracture should be treated for osteoporosis regardless of their BMD, the authors reported.

“People think osteoporosis is an inevitable consequence of aging, but it is preventable and treatable,” she said.

More information There’s more on age-linked bone loss at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.