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I asked Dr. Murray:

> You said that your clinic sees adult Celiacs ten times more often than
>  children-- do you think this is because Celiac is primarily an adult
>  -onset disease, or that children's Celiac is underdiagnosed?
> If it is primarily an adult phenomena,
>  then this means individuals who could properly digest
> gluten for decades have something triggered in them which
>  suddenly screws up their metabolism.
> This makes me wonder whether autistic children with gluten intolerance
> have a different type of Celiac disease, since these children typically
>  react poorly to gluten from their first introduction to their diet.

Dr. Murray's reply:

With regard to your question regarding whether CD actually developes
later in life rather than just not been diagnosed at an earlier stage.
There are some examples in the literature of individuals with DH who had
a normal biopsy followed several years later with a flat biopsy who most
have had not developed the disease.  It is also possible there the
biopsies while normal to the eyes of the pathologist may have harboured a
patchy or very mild that was not biopsied or was very subtle.

I suspect that some patient have some damage but no symptoms for many
years and other patients may have neither symptoms or damage until some
precipitating event occurs, such as gastroenteritis, surgery.
However without preceeding biopsies it is not possible to conclude what
this means.  Certainly there is some, albeit conflicting, evidence looking
at mucosal permeability in asymptomatic relatives of CD patients which
suggests that there may be an underlying defect even in seemingly
unaffected individuals.

I am unaware of whether there has been any work looking at mucosal
permeabiltiy in patients with autism or schizophrenia.
Perhaps someone out there is aware of some work in this regard.

Joe Murray