Events

From my notes taken at the recent gastroenterology conference…

Quotes from Proust, Nigel Slater and Laura Esquivel were not at all what I was expecting from a gastroenterology conference.

They were part of an interesting session on Food and Mood by Professor Nick Read, who talked about how food affects us all. Obviously food can affect health – we all know that from experience! And food can bring great pleasure. But Professor Read meant more than this: that food carries with it a great freight of memory and meaning, both at a cultural level, and at a personal or familial level.

He told us a story of a patient (A) who complained of an allergy to food. When he explored the start of the problem, it turned out that she’d gone out for a lovely meal with her boyfriend at their favourite fish restaurant. She expected him to propose marriage, given the setting, and given his announcement that there was something he wanted to talk to her about.

Instead he told her that he’d been having an affair with a colleague who was now pregnant, and so he wanted to break up with A.

She rushed outside and was violently sick.

Sionce then, she’d reacted in the same way every time she’d eaten fish – and the reaction had spread to other foods too. Her food issues were associated with grief.

Now, for those of you diagnosed with coeliac disease, this kind of emotional distress is clearly not the cause of the problem. Coeliac disease is a condition resulting from an actual physical condition, not an emotional one. Counselling won’t solve the problem – only a gluten free diet will […]

From my notes taken at the recent gastroenterology conference… The first session was Professor Sanders, talking about food intolerance in daily life: any errors are mine, due to the speed of note-taking!

Did you know that the percentage of people reporting food intolerance in the UK is between 2 and 20%?

The top end of this is a surprisingly high figure, but covers a wide range of symptoms and underlying problems.

As an indicator of the rise in interest in food intolerance, Professor Sanders pointed to the rapid rise in the number of medical papers available on PubMed in each year:

• 161 in 1970
• 460 in 1980
• 720 in 1990
• 860 in 2000
• 1601 in 2010

So there is a high level of interest within the medical profession, presumably because of the many people reporting problems, and the effect that these problems can have on the quality of life.

Professor Sanders spoke out strongly against some of the allergy-testing services available on the open market; he said that these can be very non-specific, and inaccurate, but that the most distressing part of the popularity of these tests is that patients pay for them out of desperation, because they have symptoms that are not being dealt with.

He made it clear that there are differences between disease, allergies and intolerances, but he also made it plain that he felt that intolerances should be dealt with and the symptoms treated, because this helps improve quality of life for patients:

• disease: evidence of a physical problem
• allergies: can be tested for
• intolerance: can deal with symptoms

So, he suggested, no matter where you fall along this spectrum, don’t hesitate to ask for help. Even if all that can be done at […]

Last week I went to part of a gastroenterology conference: the symposium for patients.

This was organised by the British Society of Gastroenterology. I’ve never been to one before, and this was a particularly interesting experience. There were – literally – hundreds of medics around the conference centre, and about 60 people attending the patients seminar. Not all these were coeliacs, though Coeliac UK were there: some were Crohn’s sufferers, and others had IBS. Some (like me) weren’t patients at all, but were there out of interest, or representing a patient. I sat next to a dietician who was there as part of her professional development, which I was delighted to see. She told me that she’d been astonished to learn how variable the dietician service-offering was across the country. Where she’d worked, they had offered three-monthly checkups initially, until people got the hang of the gluten free diet, but in some places – as we know – people are offered much less than that.

I took copious notes, which I’ll try and decipher for you over the next few days, on each of these four topics:

• Food intolerance in daily life: what’s it due to and what can you do about it?
  • Speaker was: Prof D S Sanders from Sheffield
• Food and mood: how what you eat can change the way you feel
  • Speaker was: Prof N Read from London
• Diagnostic and therapeutic challenges: coeliac disease as a cause of IBS symptoms and new approaches to treatment
  • Speaker was: Prof R Anderson from Melbourne, Australia
• Psychosocial aspects of coeliac disease: can coeliac disease affect quality of life?
  • Speaker was: Dr R Howard from Birmingham

There was also a lively Q&A session […]