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By Christopher Gaul
Senior staff correspondent
The University of Maryland researcher whose ground-breaking study revealed that celiac disease is dramatically more prevalent in the United States than previously thought said he is sure a newly developed, low-gluten eucharistic host is safe for the vast majority of sufferers of the little- known digestive disorder.
“This is really wonderful news and is going to make a big difference in the lives of what we now know to be the many people in this country who have celiac,” said Dr. Alessio Fasano, whose 2003 research discovered that more than two million Americans suffer from celiac.
Prior to the publication of the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research study, the disease was thought to be rare. But now it is clear that it’s twice as common as Crohn’s ulcerative colitis and cystic fibrosis, said the professor of pediatrics, medicine and physiology who is a parishioner of St. Paul in Ellicott City.
“If there are about 300 people in church for Mass on Sunday, then we now know that two or three of them at least are likely to have celiac,” said Dr. Fasano, who noted that the disease affects about one in 130 Americans.
Celiac disease is a digestive disorder that is triggered by the protein gluten, which is found in wheat, barley and other grains. The Vatican requires that hosts must contain some gluten, an ingredient essential in the making of actual bread, but no one in the U.S. had developed a host with a low enough quantity of gluten that celiac sufferers could tolerate without harm.
That was until last month when, in a monastery in the rolling hills of northwest Missouri, members of the Congregation of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration produced a wheat host that contained a mere 0.01 percent of gluten, a level low enough to be perfectly safe for celiac sufferers, Dr. Fasano said.
“We had been trying to develop a really, really low-gluten bread for the past 10 or more years,” said Sister Rita Dohn, O.S.B., who heads the Benedictine Sisters’ altar bread department. “After all these years of trial and error we finally did it and we’re so thrilled for people with celiac who can now receive the host.”
Sister Rita said the challenge she and her fellow Sisters faced was trying to keep just enough gluten in the bread to meet the requirements set by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, yet an amount small enough to pose no threat to celiac sufferers, as determined by medical experts.
The level achieved by the Benedictines was even lower than that of a low-gluten host developed in Italy recently and approved by the Vatican and the scientific committee of the Italian Celiac Association.
According to the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy, the Benedictine Sisters’ bread contains unleavened wheat and water, is free of additives and conforms to the requirements of the Code of Canon Law, canon 924.2.
“This low-gluten content is still enough gluten to confect bread for the Eucharist,” the committee determined. “(It) is the only true, low-gluten altar bread known to the Secretariat and approved for use at Mass in the United States.”
However, committee officials cautioned that while gluten-intolerant persons may be able to consume the low-gluten host, or some portion of it, they are “strongly advised” to check with their personal physicians first. Prior to the development of the low-gluten host, U.S. bishops had advised celiac sufferers to receive Communion only in the form of consecrated wine.
The celiac issue was thrown into the public spotlight in the U.S. in 2001 when the parents of a five-year-old Boston girl with celiac disease left the Catholic Church after their pastor would not allow them to substitute the wheat host with a rice wafer for her first Communion.
Until the results of Dr. Fasano’s study were made known last year, doctors rarely diagnosed celiac disease in their patients who suffered from symptoms of gastrointestinal discomfort or distress.
“I look back and I think, how many patients over the years have I missed who had celiac disease whom we said had IBS (irritable bowel syndrome)? Hundreds, hundreds,” said Mercy Medical Center’s Dr. Michael Cox, a gerontologist for the past 25 years.
He said that of the patients who now return to him with symptoms of IBS, five to 10 percent are testing positive for celiac.
“I’m diagnosing more and more people with celiac now,” Dr. Cox said. “It’s out there in unprecedented numbers. I’ve diagnosed more patients with celiac in the past year than in all my 25 years of practice.”