Nutritional status in adolescents and young adults with screen-detected celiac disease.

Objective: To describe the nutritional status in patients with screen-detected celiac disease (CD).

Methods: Nutritional status was assessed by serum tests and anthropometric measures in 26 subjects (16 to 25 years of age) with biopsy-proven CD and 29 healthy control subjects (16 to 21 years of age) with negative tissue transglutaminase antibodies (16 to 22 years of age); all the subjects were selected from the cohort of 3654 schoolchildren.

Results: Compared with control subjects, CD patients had lower median values of whole blood folic acid (91 versus 109 nmol/L; P = 0.01), serum ferritin (14 versus 27 microg/L; P = 0.028) and pre-albumin (0.21 versus 0.28 g/L; P
Conclusions: One third of screen-detected adolescent CD subjects have abnormalities in folate or iron status that call for early diagnosis and dietary treatment of the disease to prevent nutritional deficiencies.