ORLANDO – Patients with eosinophilic esophagitis had a ninefold increased prevalence of celiac disease, compared with the general public, in a review of more than 35 million U.S. residents.
This finding, which corresponded to a 2% overall prevalence rate of celiac disease in patients diagnosed with eosinophilic esophagitis, suggests that routine screening for celiac disease in eosinophilic esophagitis patients is warranted, Emad Mansoor, MD, said at the World Congress of Gastroenterology at ACG 2017.
This high prevalence level “has great implications for how we screen, treat, and manage” patients with either disorder, Dr. Mansoor said in a video interview. He hypothesized that celiac disease and eosinophilic esophagitis could share genetic etiologies or environmental or autoimmune triggers that produce the high level of overlap that the results showed.
The same analysis also found high rates of celiac disease in patients with either eosinophilic gastroenteritis or colitis, but because these are both much less prevalent than eosiniphillic esophagitis the absolute number of patients with either of these eosinophilic disorders who also had celiac disease was much lower.
It’s very possible that the prevalence of eosinophilic esophagitis among patients with celiac disease is also significantly elevated, compared with the general population, but he and his associates have not run this analysis.
Their study included diagnostic records for 35,795,250 people in the Explorys database during May 2012 to May 2017, with entries from 317,000 providers at 360 U.S. hospitals. The review identified 84,040 patients with a diagnosis of celiac disease, 15,360 with eosinophilic esophagitis, 1,440 with eosinophilic gastritis, and 800 with eosinophilic colitis. This worked out to a 5-year prevalence rate of 234.8 cases of celiac disease per 100,000 patients (0.235%), an eosinophilic esophagitis prevalence of 43.7 per 100,000, an eosinophilic gastroenteritis rate of 4.0 per 100,000, and an eosinophilic colitis rate of 2.2 per 100,000, said Dr. Mansoor, a gastroenterologist at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center.
The prevalence of celiac disease among patients with eosinophilic gastroenteritis or colitis was higher than in the eosinophilic esophagitis patients, with rates of 3.5% and 3.7%, respectively, that translated into odds ratios about 16-fold higher than the prevalence rates in the general population for both of these eosionophilic disorders.
The analyses reported by Dr. Mansoor also showed that the prevalence of celiac disease among patients with eosinophilic esophagitis was nearly twice as high in children (not more than 18 years old) as in adults and 50% higher in women than in men. These age and sex differences were both statistically significant.
Dr. Mansoor had no disclosures.
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