me and my health

Hey. For the last 19 months i have been back and fore my (not so) local hospital to see a peadiactric gasteroenternologist.

In November 2006 i was diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia which basically means that there wasn't enough iron in my blood. My doctor ordered more tests to find out what the cause of this was.

I was told that i had high TTG. In the UK under 10 is considered normal and mine was over 200.
In January i saw my peadi for the first time, he told me that he was nearly 100% sure i had coeliac and that my biopsy (biopsies are used to confirm coeliac) would be positive. So, in march i had my biopsy. It was negative, which you might think is good news. Not with TTG like mine. The bloods were repeated and came back the same as before, and in November the bloods were again the same, so my peadi decided to go with the bloods.
In December 2007 i was diagnosed with coeliac disease (also known as celiac disease, coeliac sprue and gluten sensitive enthropathy). Coeliac is an auto immune intolerance to gluten that runs in families. When someone with coeliac eats gluten (a protein found in wheat rye barley and sometimes oats) it damages the villi that line the small intestine, these villi help to absorb nutrients and digest food. As the condition progresses, the villi become increasingly damaged making it harder and harder for nutrients to ba absorbed and food to be digested. The immune system tries to help with this but it actually makes it worse because it ends up attacking the body's own tissue. There are many different symptoms of coeliac disease and some people dont get any symptoms at all, this is known as asymptomatic or silent coeliac. People without symptoms are still at risk of long term complications such as iron deficiency and osteoporosis.
For more information see http://groups.google.com/group/coeliaczone/web/an-introduction-to-coeliac?hl=en or http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/celiac/. Living with coeliac is made easier in the UK by free prescription foods and free health care which includes input from a dietitian every few months. Also new food labeling laws mean that packaging will soon have to change its wording to make it easier to understand. There is not yet a cure for coeliac but thankfully people with the condition can lead normal healthy lives as long as they cut gluten out of their diets

I also have a condition called benign familiar hypocaluric hypercalcemia (BFHH). The easiest way to understand this is to break the name up. Benign means that its harmless, familiar means that it runs in families, hypocaluric means that the body gets rid of less calcium than normal and hypercalcemia means that there is more calcium in the blood than normal. Hypercalcemia is sometimes caused by an over active parathyroid (a gland in your neck that makes PTH, a hormone responsible for controlling calcium levels), in people with BFHH its the calcium sensor that is faulty. Every body has a calcium sensor that detects the amount of calcium in the blood, in people with a normal calcium sensor, once the calcium level reaches about 2.6 (the upper bound of normal), the sensor would send a message to the parathyroid telling it to stop releasing PTH, this would alow the calcium level to drop back down to the normal level for that person. In someone with a faulty sensor, this doesnt happen until the calcium reaches about 2.8-2.9, consequently it is normal for people with BFHH to have a calcium level of 2.7-2.8 (higher than what is considered normal in most people) all the time while still having normal levels of PTH (in normal circumstances the PTH levels would be expected to drop with calcium over 2.6).
The condition is harmless and needs no treatment although some doctors may get confused and think that a person is suffering from hyperparathyroidism (over active thyroid).