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I was happy to get so many responses to my post. There must have been close
to 50 people who answered it. One thing that most of you adviced was to
have a bone density scan done(dexascan). I would recommend it to everyone
who has celiac to have it done, since there are no symptoms of osteoporosis
until you actually start breaking bones. This way you can start treatment
before it gets to late. I know my calcium levels were always very low.
There are also a number of skin conditions associated with celiac, my
doctor told me today that I was having an allergic reaction that was
causing the blisters on my hands and on my scalp to the celiac. He did not
tell me the name of it but someone did mention Scleroderma. He said as long
as it did not get infected it did not need to be treated.

Many of you showed interest about the chest pains I had been having, many
of you had also experienced them. I had many different explanations for
them, with the most common being reflux disease. Among the other
explanations were blood clots, asthma, heartburn, fibromylagia, and muscle
spasms. The one I found the most interesting was called Prinzmental's
Angina in which your body does not get enough calcium which causes your
Coronary artery to go into a spasm. This does not allow enough oxygen to
your heart and causes a miniture heart attack. I also came accross a term
called celiac compression syndrome which also causes the artery to become
compressed and can cause heart attacks as well.

My doctor felt I had had muscle spasms since they had tried me on
medications for reflux disease before and they did not work. But most the
doctors I have talked to don't really know what it is. When asked if it is
related to celiac they say they don't know. Most the time it happened I was
having problems with celiac when I got it. The doctor just told me to get
the celiac under control so hopefully I would not get any more of the
attacks. There is very little information on celiac compression syndrome
and this was the first time I had heard of the other term. I will do more
research on both. I think it would be a very good idea to have a survey of
people who have celiac who have chest pains or heart problems and more
research I thinks needs to be done on especially heart problems related to
celiac. Because hiatal hernias and reflux disease can also mimic another
more serious heart condition and vise versa. Therefore I feel doctors need
to become more educated on celiac many doctors I have seen have never even
heard of it and did not know what to look for. It took almost a year before
they finally discovered out what it was.

Another interesting characteristic that popped up was that several of
you also mentioned that you or your children were double jointed or
hypermobile like my family is and that there tended to be problems with
calcium and Vitamin D defeciencies along with arthiritius.  Another
person was told that they were missing disulfide molecules in their
collagan tissue which caused them problems with their legs. I was
wondering if there could be a connection. I did find a connection with
some of the other families on the asperger's/High functioning autism
forum whigh also had these characteristics and seizures. One other
doctor told their patient that they were experiencing a type of seizure
when they had these chest pain attacks I thought this was very
interesting as well.

Again thank you for the great response if any of you would like to get in
touch with me about anything I wrote, please let me know.

Diana at [log in to unmask]