[Celiac disease and dietary habits in the 1st year of life]

The Authors have performed a study on the dietary habits of 74 celiac children and have analysed retrospectively the type of nursing (breast-feeding or bottle-feeding), the time and the age of gluten introduction. Then they related these data to the age of onset of symptoms. Children breast-fed for 3 months or more showed a marked delay in the onset of the disease and a longer latency time from gluten introduction when compared with bottle-fed children; on the contrary early gluten introduction was not positively correlated to risk of celiac disease. This observations induce to think that breast-feeding may be a protective factor towards coeliac disease, while the precocious gluten introduction is not an important factor of risk correlated to this disease.