Researchers at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital have shown for the first time that a tiny intestinal worm could hold the key to treating coeliac disease.

Coeliac patients were infected with the human hookworm, Necator americanus, then fed white bread each day for 21 weeks and examined for any reaction.

Those patients with the gut worms fared dramatically better after exposure to gluten than those without worms. Tests also revealed that those with worms experienced less inflammation and suffered less damage to their intestinal wall.

Most significantly, when the volunteers were offered de-worming medication at the end of the trial to kill off the worms, all of them chose to keep their new-found little friends!

Read details of the study at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...tion=australia

and more comment at: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/con...9/s2721104.htm

More about the use of 'Helminthic Therapy' in general can be found at:

http://www.foodsmatter.com/natural_m...c_therapy.html

Hi John -
Maybe things are looking up for coeliacs! Apart from your suggested treatments, I have just posted an article on the FM site reporting of a whole series of possible preventions/treatments for coeliac disease including delaying the introduction of gluten into infants' diets and a whole raft of pharmaceutical/therapeutical interventions (including helminthic therapy) several of which are showing real promise.

This brilliant new article by William Parker of Duke University explains that, as humans did not evolve as a single species but co-evolved with a range of other organisms as a 'super-organism', the only reasonable solution to many of our modern diseases - including allergies and autoimmune diseases such as Coeliac disease - may be to replace some of the most important beneficial organisms that we have lost in the last century due to hygiene and sanitation, in particular the intestinal worms called helminths.

Only a small trial, but sadly very negative: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21408161 - disappointing, but in a separate report I read the researchers weren't abandoning the approach yet.

__________________
Alex Gazzola
Deputy Editor, SkinsMatter.com - www.skinsmatter.com
www.alexgazzola.co.uk
http://foodallergyandintolerance.blogspot.com

The result of this trial is not surprising: 15 hookworms are not enough to do the job, and 21 weeks is an insufficient time for hookworm to deliver what they are capable of.

35 hookworms is a reasonable therapeutic dose, with some people needing even more than this (200-300 hookworms can be hosted safely, without developing hookworm "disease") and these little guys don't achieve their ultimate equilibrium with the body until 45 weeks.

Why the researchers persist in using such small numbers and short duration trials, after safety has already been established in previous trials, is something of a mystery to those of us who are using hookworms to treat ourselves. But perhaps this has something to do with the fact that what the researchers are striving for is not to develop a treatment involving the worms themselves but the isolation of a molecule that can be synthesized and used to produce a lucrative drug.

The need for a paradigm shift in the researchers' thinking is eloquently explained in this article, and the sooner this change occurs the better it will be for the millions of people in the developed world who are suffering needlessly from allergic and autoimmune diseases because they have an unrecognised and untreated worm deficiency.

What is really significant about the Australian coeliac trial is that all participants in this study refused to give up their worms at the end of the trial. Even though they had not met the trial's criteria for success, they were beginning to feel better! Like the hundreds of others who are hosting worms for therapeutic reasons, they will continue to improve and, in time, and if they add to their worm colony, at least 75 per cent of them will perhaps be able to resume eating gluten.

I did not have coeliac disease, but I was unable to eat any normal food, and forced to live on a special medically-prescribed "food" - until I signed up a team of expert immune-regulating technicians in the form of 35 hoookworms. I now have 75 "little friends" on board and can eat anything that I want.

Yeah, it depends how you measure success.

Although the trial wasn't an end-point success, some of the findings are extremely encouraging, as this excerpt from the transcript of the TV segment shows:

Dr John Croese:
These are exciting results. This is fluid from the bowel before and after gluten.
And in the people who have got no hookworm the inflammatory proteins increase
quiet dramatically but people with hookworm infection it is suppressed.

Dr Jonica Newby:
It is a really noticeable difference isn't it.

Dr John Croese:
It is, it is a very significant difference too.

Gluten intolerance success story - (email from a very happy worm host):

"Hi Jasper and Marc

Well, it's been about a year since I had my first dose of hookworm, and four months since I had my second dose together with a dose of whipworm (primarily for intolerances to gluten and dairy protein).

After my first dose, I found I could tolerate barley gluten-containing products (including beer and malt-containing soy milk) but not wheat gluten-containing products or dairy products. For the last few weeks, I have been consuming not only beer but also wheat gluten-containing products (including bread, pastry and pizza) AND dairy products (including ice cream) with no reaction.

This is profoundly life-changing for me. I appear to have been successfully treated for something which imposed significant constraints on my lifestyle and from which I expected to suffer for the rest of my life. Now I need to make sure I stay infected.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is fantastic!

Rob"

Read more...

And this guy has added a slightly more detailed post about his success with gluten sensitivity, at:

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group...y/message/7215

A new audio report from Australia, which offers a good grounding: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthrepor...11/3239727.htm

__________________
Alex Gazzola
Deputy Editor, SkinsMatter.com - www.skinsmatter.com
www.alexgazzola.co.uk
http://foodallergyandintolerance.blogspot.com

Actually, this interview doesn't add anything new to the information in the posts above, and some of the description of helminthic therapy by Prof. Loucas is disturbingly sloppy.

To start with, he describes the therapeutic use of helminths as "helminth therapy", which is actually the name given to the practice of de-worming people! The therapeutic use of helminths is correctly called "helminthic therapy".

Secondly, Prof Loucas goes on to say "... we are talking about big parasites often many, many centimetres long..." which gives completely the wrong impression and may unfortunately put some people off the therapy.

It's surprising how many people today have a worm phobia and are often effectively prevented from using helminthic therapy because of a strong reaction to the idea of hosting intestinal worms. In fact, the hookworm that is used for therapy is only 1 cm long and not much thicker than a human hair, and it is never visible to the patient at any time before, during or after their treatment.

To reiterate the key problem with the research described in this interview, the number of worms given to the trial subjects was insufficient to achieve full remission of coeliac, or any other, disease, and the subjects' response to wheat was tested at far too early a stage in the worm/host relationship for full effectiveness to have been reached. Considering these points, it is very significant that many of the treated patients said they actually felt better and opted to either keep their hookworm infection or acquire a new one.

I remain extremely doubtful that there will be a realistic trial - using a truly therapeutic dose and a realistic timescale - anytime soon because, as the leader of this trial has said, "Our ultimate goal is to identify new ways of inhibiting autoimmunity and improve the quality of life for coeliac sufferers." And, by "new ways", he means new drugs derived from molecules isolated from the worms, not the use of the worms themselves.

The researchers are all overlooking the obvious - the fact that we need to put back the living worms with which we have co-evolved for aeons - because medical research is largely funded by the big pharmaceutical companies who are not in the slightest bit interested in any treatment that they can't patent, especially one that is a huge threat to their profits from a whole slew of existing, very lucrative drugs.