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The team from the University of Oxford, supported by the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), also found that many of these changes in the gut persisted despite treatment with a gluten-free diet, suggesting there may be an immune ‘scar’ in the gut, which could explain why some patients experience ongoing symptoms.
Coeliac disease is a common condition affecting around one in 100 people. Symptoms are triggered by exposure to gluten in the diet. Gluten is found in foods containing wheat, barley and rye.
However, we do not know why some people develop the disease and others do not, nor how the changes seen in the gut take place. Although symptoms improve on a gluten-free diet, this does not represent a cure.
In this study, published in Nature Immunology, the researchers from the University’s Translational Gastroenterology and Liver Unit (TGLU), MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (MRC-WIMM) and Centre for Human Genetics used gene sequencing methods called single cell and spatial transcriptomics to study how different cell types in the gut lining changed in adults and children with coeliac disease.
These methods examine which genes are being expressed in every single cell in gut samples, and where in the gut lining these cells and genes are found.
Read the full story on the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre website.