Celiac Disease

Discordance for childhood coeliac disease in monozygotic twins

“…However, the mode of inheritance of coeliac disease has not yet been generally agreed to. There are a number of reports of twins who also were said to have coeliac disease in childhood (Fanconi, 1928;Haas, 1932;Collishaw, 1940;MacDonald, Dobbins, and Rubin, 1965) but in only one of these reports is small intestinal biopsy used to establish the diagnosis (MacDonald et al, 1965) and in none of these reports is the zygosity of the twins clearly established. Discordance for adult coeliac disease has been documented in one monozygotic twin pair (Hoffman, Wollaeger, and Greenberg, 1966) but there is no similar report in children, where the diagnosis of coeliac disease has been established by biopsy, although Carter et al (1959) did report discordance for childhood coeliac disease in twins, but their diagnosis was not based on small intestinal biopsy.…”