New Study at Odds with Previous Research
The latest analysis from the Enquiring About Tolerance (EAT) infant food prevention trial demonstrated that very early exposure to high-dose gluten was linked to a lower prevalence of celiac disease in 3-year-old children. Celiac disease is occasionally associated with autism. Earlier trials by EAT showed little or no association between the timing of wheat introduction and the prevalence of celiac disease. However, those findings did not include high-dose exposures. The new EAT research included 1004 infants that were divided into two groups. One group was exposed to high-dose gluten between 4-6 months of age, the other group was exclusively breastfed until 6 months of age. At 3 years old, none of the children with early exposure to high-dose gluten had developed celiac disease, while 1.4% of the children who were exclusively breastfed developed the disease. Since celiac disease doesn’t often present until the teen years or even adulthood, this new finding may prove to be inconclusive over time.
