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Dear Listmates,

Thank you, one and all, for your quick and helpful responses to my
plea for illuminating information on the gluten-ataxia connection.

In short, there is a body of research supporting such a connection.
Ataxia, however, is just a term covering a huge array of conditions
affecting coordination. Gluten ataxia now appears to be the most
common ataxia of idiopathic (unknown cause) origin. A Celiac who has
ataxia does not necessarily have gluten ataxia, however.

Definition from a website, below:

What is Ataxia?

Ataxia is a symptom, not a specific disease or diagnosis. Ataxia
means clumsiness, or loss of coordination. Ataxia may affect the
fingers and hands, the arms or legs, the body, speech or eye
movements. This loss of coordination may be caused by a number of
different medical or neurologic conditions; for this reason, it is
important that a person with ataxia seek medical attention to
determine the underlying cause of the symptom and to get the
appropriate treatment.


My own decision is to see a neurologist.

A Google search using the term "gluten ataxia" will yield a lot of information.

The easiest way to find definitions of medical terms, I think, is
simply to plug the word into Google and add "definition" to the
search term. First item up is usually a nice concise explanation.

Early on, I did find an ataxia.com site, but right now Safari is
cycling me to cyperfinder.com so perhaps there is some problem with
the ataxia site.

The most useful site I found, thanks to a tip from a Listmate, is
www.pubmed.com, which is associated with the NIH. Short summary of
what I found: At this point, there is no consensus about the efficacy
of a gluten-free diet in stemming the progression of gluten ataxia.
There are not yet a lot of studies. Ron Hoggan points out that the
meaning of "gluten-free" is not consistent from one country to
another, so research subjects in some cases may not have been 100%
gluten-free.

I have cut and pasted onto a Word documents the pubmed abstracts I
found most interesting. If you would like me to forward that document
to you privately, please e-mail me and I shall send it as an
attachment.

Thanks again, everyone!

Mary Brown
NYC

PS Got no flames, not one. Just really nice, helpful responses.
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