Celiac Disease: A Brief Review of Current Literature

Celiac disease (also known as celiac sprue or gluten-sensitive enteropathy) is a systemic immune-mediated inflammatory disease triggered by permanent sensitivity to dietary gluten in genetically disposed people. Gluten is a protein complex found in wheat, rye, and barley, which are degraded into antigenic peptides that stimulate an immunologic reaction; characterized by a wide array of clinical symptoms; including diarrhea, malabsorption, eventually nutritional deficiencies and failure to thrive and variable damage to the mucosa of the small intestines [1].