• Posted June 20, 2025

New Blood Test Promises Pain-Free Diagnosis Of Celiac Disease

FRIDAY, June 20, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Celiac disease patients currently must make themselves sicker before they're able to seek treatment.

The tests now used to diagnose celiac disease require patients to eat gluten, the protein that provokes an autoimmune reaction, then chart their response.

But a new blood test promises to change all that, researchers reported.

The test looks for a specific immune response to gluten within a person’s blood, and can detect celiac disease even if a person is on a gluten-free diet for their GI symptoms, researchers reported recently in the journal Gastroenterology.

“There are likely millions of people around the world living with undiagnosed celiac disease simply because the path to diagnosis is difficult, and at times, debilitating,” said senior researcher Jason Tye-Din, head of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute’s Celiac Research Laboratory in Parkville, Australia.

“This new test promises to simplify and speed up accurate diagnosis, while also avoiding the suffering that comes with eating gluten for extended periods to reactivate celiac disease,” he added in a news release.

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder in which eating gluten causes the immune system to attack and damage the small intestine. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye and barley.

Researchers developed the test based on an unexpected discovery in 2019, when a team found that the immune marker interleukin 2 spikes in the bloodstream of people with celiac disease after they eat gluten.

Based on this, the researchers created a test that provokes this immune response by exposing blood samples to gluten in a test tube.

For the new study, researchers tried out their blood test on samples from 181 volunteers recruited at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia.

The volunteers included 75 celiac patients on a gluten-free diet; 13 people with untreated celiac disease; 32 people with non-celiac gluten sensitivity; and 61 healthy folks to serve as a control group.

As expected, the IL-2 signal only increased in the blood of volunteers with celiac disease, demonstrating that the immune response can be detected in a test tube, researchers said.

The test proved 90% accurate in identify people with celiac disease, and 97% accurate in ruling out folks who don’t have the disorder, results show.

“We also found the strength of the IL-2 signal correlated with the severity of a patient’s symptoms, allowing us to predict how severely a person with celiac disease might react to gluten, without them actually having to eat it,” lead investigator Olivia Moscatelli, a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne, said in a news release.

Moscatelli herself was diagnosed with celiac disease at 18, and said she’s thrilled with the results.

“This breakthrough is deeply personal as it could spare others from the grueling diagnostic process I had to endure,” she said. “Knowing I’ve played a role in this achievement is a powerful, full-circle moment.”

However, the technology used by the researchers is highly sensitive and can detect the IL-2 signal at very low levels, meaning this test currently is out of reach for most pathology labs, the team noted.

“It’s like the equivalent of being able to detect a single grain of sand in a swimming pool,” Moscatelli said.

Researchers said future studies should see whether similar blood tests could be used to detect other conditions, including type 1 diabetes, cancer, transplant rejection and infectious diseases.

More information

The Celiac Disease Foundation has more about celiac disease.

SOURCE: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, news release, June 9, 2025