Screening for Type 1 Diabetes-, Thyroid-, Gastric-, and Adrenal-Specific Humoral Autoimmunity in 529 Children and Adolescents With Celiac Disease at Diagnosis Identifies as Positive One in Every Nine Patients.

Organ-specific autoimmune disorders are often associated with celiac disease (CD) (1,2). Most studies investigated the frequency of CD humoral autoimmunity in patients at diagnosis of an organ-specific autoimmune disorder or along its course. Conversely, only two studies, dating back to the early 2000s, were aimed at determining the frequency and co-occurrence of organ-specific autoimmunity in CD patients at diagnosis (3,4). These studies reported discordant, excessively high positivities for diabetes-specific autoimmunity (12.2% and 31.6%, respectively) that may be explained by the small number of patients investigated and the use of, at least in part, outdated techniques such as islet cell autoantibody assay. On these bases, our aim was to evaluate in a large cohort of CD patients at diagnosis the real frequency and co-occurrence of humoral immunoreactivity specific of four organ-specific autoimmune disorders known to be associated to CD, namely, type 1 diabetes (T1D), autoimmune thyroid disease (HT), autoimmune atrophic gastritis (AG), and Addison …