For patients with celiac disease, following a gluten-free diet is complicated and often challenging.

“Our patients are navigating a gluten-free diet without any feedback to guide them,” says Jocelyn Silvester, MD, PhD, director of research at the Celiac Disease Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Symptoms are not a reliable indicator of gluten exposure. Many patients may not have any symptoms at all.”

For clinicians, assessing how well patients are doing on a gluten-free diet can be equally difficult. “There are no good measures of how well the gluten-free-diet is working or how well patients are following the diet,” Silvester says.

Moreover, tolerance to gluten can vary in celiac disease. Some children have symptoms despite being (apparently) on a gluten-free diet. Others have no symptoms after a gluten exposure, yet show severe atrophy of the nutrient-absorbing villi on intestinal biopsy. Villous atrophy poses a risk for complications, such as poor growth, anemia and osteoporosis. …