The Health Blog

While the diagnosis may be suspected from the symptoms, it can be confirmed by taking a biopsy from the bowel. This involves removing a small piece of the bowel wall and examining it under the microscope. Once the gluten has been eliminated from the diet, a repeat biopsy should show the appearance of the bowel has returned to normal.

Elimination of gluten from the diet will usually produce improvement within a few days but it may take up to a year for the child to fully regain normal health.

Parents of children or adults with this disorder need the advice of a dietitian to plan proper meals which are fully nourishing. There is a Coeliac Society which can give advice in planning meals and playing a supportive role to sufferers and their families.

It needs to be stressed that parents whose children have similar symptoms to those I have listed as occurring in coeliac disease should not assume that this may be the cause and place their children on a gluten-free diet without proper diagnosis being made.

If this is done without proper advice, the diet chosen may be inadequate in all the necessary factors and result in further malnutrition.

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I’ll explain here what the lymph system is, because it is important in understanding cancer. When you get a sore throat you may get swollen, painful lumps in your neck. These are lymph nodes (also called lymph glands). Normally they are smaller than a pea and quite soft. There is a network of these nodes throughout your body, and they are all connected to each other by very fine channels (or vessels). Eventually, all these channels join into one which empties its contents into the bloodstream at a point just behind the inner end of your left collarbone.

The job of the lymph system is to drain all excess fluid from your tissues and to filter out any unwanted material. So, with your sore throat, the germs go through the lymph channels to the nearest lymph nodes in your neck. There they are filtered out and white blood cells get to work on them and destroy them. In the process the node gets bigger, harder and painful.

In the same way, lymph nodes will filter out and trap cancer cells which come to them through the lymph channels. The nodes actually form part of your immune system and so have cells in them which ‘recognise’ the cancer cells as dangerous. If only a few cells come through, they can be completely destroyed. If there are too many for the node to handle, they survive, and grow to form a hard, but usually painless, lump. This is a type of secondary growth and it, in turn, can release cancer cells to travel either through more lymph channels or the blood to other parts of the body.

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