Fructan, Rather Than Gluten, Induces Symptoms in Patients With Self-Reported Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity

Fructan, Rather Than Gluten, Induces Symptoms in Patients With Self-Reported Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity

Gry I. Skodje et al

Gastroentorology February 2018Volume 154, Issue 3, Pages 529–539.e2

http://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(17)36302-3/fulltext

 

Was alerted to this by Jen Brea tweet. My excuses for not trying fodmap, or at least fructan free, diet are dwindling. Would appreciate feedback on the paper

 

Wouldn't people with supposed non-celiac gluten sensitivity still be symptomatic after avoiding gluten if it was fructans? There are a lot of other foods containing fructans that these people don't necessarily avoid.

 

There is a related thread discussing a report on this study, rather than the actual study.

I discussed what fructans actually are in that thread that noted that

The original paper also misses the point.

In any case, the study itself is not terribly impressive. In the summary they state

In the results section, they go on to say,

That's pretty dishonest in my book since many people only read the summary to get the gist of the study. The authors are deliberately trying to make their results look better than they actually are (not that the uncorrected results are outstanding either) because they are so marginal.

The best they can scrape up is a borderline difference between fructan and gluten response. Note there is no difference between fructan and placebo response so really does this mean anything at all? If it does mean anything, they are saying that, for the overall group, there was a slightly increased response to fructans.

They go on to look at individual response within the group and report

The group size was 59, so about 1/4 participants had the highest response to placebo, just slightly more had the highest response to fructans and about 1/5 had the highest response to gluten.

Not really anything to get terribly excited about and we are still none the wiser about the cause of non-coeliac gluten sensitivity.

 

Thank you @alicec - a big help (so foggy!)