<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>> At 05:30 PM 7/28/1999 -0400, Julie Benzinger wrote: >The responses were comforting and many of you expressed the same worry >about intestinal lymphoma. > >-4 people said not to be too concerned about it but be sure to stay gf. >-1 person said to have a colonoscopy done every 5 years. >-1 person said to have an endoscopy done every 1-2 years. >-2 people said to have a CT scan or barium xray or small bowel series > xray. > >I haven't figured out what, if anything, I will do. The responses >helped me to feel less alone and less worried!!! Thanks very much to >everyone who responded. Julie, it looks like there is about a 3% chance of developing lymphoma in the later stages of the disease: that implies that the 3% risk is for those who do not treat or take care of their celiac. The website listed below has a lot of interesting information and connections with other diseases for celiacs -- sometime when you feel like spending some time deciphering what it means. This site is for those who can feel comfortable reading things they do not understand much of, or for those who read it with medical encyclopedia in hand, and who still will not understand a lot, unless they are expert at statistics and how very objective control group studies are done. It is the largest study done in the US, at the veterans hospital with millions of patients. -vance From:http://csaceliacs.org/CeliacSprueamong.htm We confirmed the increased risk of developing malignant lymphoma found in other populations. Lymphoma occurred in 3% of our case population. Higher prevalence rates of lymphoma were reported by previous studies. However, the diagnosis was frequently established by postmortem examination, and the enrollment of patients into the study was biased towards patients with lymphoma. Lymphoma is commonly underdiagnosed during life, because symptoms of therapy resistant celiac sprue can mask those of lymphoma. Superficial lymphadenopathy was found at initial presentation in 41% of the celiac patients with lymphoma, the lymphadenopathy itself tended to appear rather late in the course of the disease. However, no data exists about the predictive value of peripheral lymphadenopathy with respect to the development of malignant lymphoma.