--on a number of health news aggregators.

It would certainly be a good addition to the tests available to determine gluten problems, if it pans out to be sensitive and specific for wide swaths of the population. There have certainly been problems in the past with serological tests producing false negative and false positives. The former are more troublesome--it has been estimated that as many as 20 percent of those with biopsy proven celiac came up negative on the supposedly most specific IgA anti-transglutaminase assay.

I do wonder, though, what the correlation is with this test for those who have non-gastrointestinal manifestations of gluten sensitivity. As the work of Dr. Hadijvassiliou and others has pointed out, there are people who don't get intestinal manifestation early on in their course and may present with other symptoms, particularly neurological ones (and these people may have genetic backgrounds different from those of more "classic celiacs"). Many are familiar with the skin condition known as dermatitis hepatiformis, which is known to be a non-intestinal manifestation of gluten autoimmunity, but many doctors are less aware of neurologic manifestations.