Question by Joe Rubin: My 6 yr old daughter gets eczema or itchy hand after eating bread?
Hi all,
My daughter has an itchy hand every time I give her bread or some things with gluten. However a blood test showed she does NOT have celiac disease where one can not tolerate or there is intolerance to gluten.
What can this be and what would you do? THANKS
Best answer:
Answer by Shauna
There are a lot of common ingredients in bread that she could be reacting to. Probably worth an allergy test and a food journal with an elimination diet, including to wheat.
However, re: the celiac test – you may not want to discount celiac disease completely, if allergy tests don’t turn up anything. There is about a 20% false negative rate with the blood tests for celiac disease, and that’s in adults. With children, it’s even higher. Basically, it’s because the test itself is not actually FOR celiac disease. It detects various antibodies and such that our bodies make in response to gluten if we HAVE celiac disease and it is active, although a few other conditions can cause the same jump in antibodies.
However, we make more antibodies if we have severely damaged intestines. In practice, a person with patchy internal damage tends to have much lower levels of these antibodies in the blood and may test negative to for celiac disease, even though they have the disease. The reason that children have a higher false negative rate is because they tend to have patchy damage more than adults do. :-/
It’s often worthwhile getting a copy of the results yourself, to check it yourself and see what they are, especially in case you ever get her tested again in the future, so you can see if her levels remain the same or increase (people with celiac disease in the family, for example, should get tested at least every 5 years, because the disease can trigger at any time of life).
There is also something known as non-celiac gluten intolerance. This was only proven to exist in studies about 1 1/2 years ago, so there is no test for it, very little known about it, etc… The only thing that is done is a person goes on a gluten free diet and checks health to see how it affects you, or doesn’t. Some non-celiacs with this seem to be just as sensitive as a celiac is to gluten, only with different reactions.
Does your little one react to malt, as well? That is also gluten, so if she reacts to a malted milkshake with itching just like with bread, that’s a good clue that gluten could be involved. But if she doesn’t, that may help you narrow down to something else, like the wheat alone.
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If it’s not gluten, then it could be a different ingredient that those things have in common, such as eggs, yeast, etc. I would start keeping a food diary on this and consult with an allergist.
Shes probably allergic to something in the bread!! Test and see if shes allergic to anything else with gluten. I am allergic to milk, gluten, nuts, soybeans, and eggs. My body is full of eczema and my dad has it as well because its impossible NOT to eat foods that include those things..thats why i have to carry around an Epi-Pen just in case I have a heart attack..I had to get a full blown test done to see what i was allergic to…I say stop giving your daughter bread and go see dermatologist. He can prescribe some cream and figure out why your daughter gets eczema from eating bread. I heard that in some states there are gluten free and nuts free foods by a company called Enjoy Life. In Puerto Rico we dont have it but in the states you can find it in grocery stores. Anyways, theres different packages and substitutes for gluten and stuff. Hope I could help some and i hope you figure out whats wrong with your daughter. 🙂
It could be that she’s not allergic to gluten but wheat. My mother is allergic to wheat.
I would suggest that you consult an specialist regarding allergies, you can get her tested for more than just wheat in case she is allergic to anything else, too.
so make her wash her hands after she touches bread.
for cripes frikkin SAKE.
this is not rocket science.
This is something you should be discussing with her doctor, not a bunch of non-doctor strangers on the internet. That said, my understanding is that the blood test for celiac disease isn’t the most sure method of determining whether or not someone does in fact have celiac. And of course there are plenty of other things that could be causing it, like allergies to some other common ingredient in foods that have gluten (but not the gluten itself).