A new test for Celiac disease doesn’t require a month or more of eating gluten or painful intestinal biopsies.

Whole blood tests are often used to diagnose infectious diseases, but up until now, they haven’t been used to identify autoimmune disorders like Celiac disease (CD).

Currently, the “gold-standard” for diagnosing gluten allergies is finding characteristic damage to the small intestine, says Jason Tye-Din, M.D., head of Celiac Research at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Unfortunately, that process can be very invasive and require weeks of consuming gluten, which is after all the root of the problem. Also, it’s an option only after intestinal damage occurs.

But Tye-Din and his team may have found an alternative, and one that could not only diagnose CD, but catch it before the damage has been done. And the entire process takes four days or less, with test results in about 24 hours.

The researchers say the test can determine CD with 85 to 94 percent specificity and exclude those who don’t have it with 100 percent specificity. Tye-Din and his team published their study results in Clinical & Experimental Immunology.

“We compared a newer, more simple approach using whole blood…to a more traditional and more technically demanding approach called ELISpot and showed they performed similarly,” he said.

Though worldwide only one in a hundred people has CD, according to the Celiac Disease Foundation, researchers from Rochester, Minn. found earlier this year that gluten allergies are on the rise in North America.

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