Professor David van Heel of Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry led a team of international professionals that examined genetic material from 9,451 people with celiac disease. Researchers found that people with celiac disease had disturbances in how the body’s T cells react to wheat proteins, how the thymus gland eliminates these cells, and how the body responds to viral infections.

“We now understand that many of these genetic risk factors work by altering the amounts of these immune system genes that cells make,” van Heel explained in a press release. “The data also suggests that celiac disease is made up of hundreds of genetic risk factors. We can have a good guess at nearly half of the genetic risk at present.”

Gluten is found in products made from wheat, barley, and rye. When a person with celiac eats foods that contain gluten, the villi in the small intestine are damaged or destroyed and cannot absorb nutrients. Symptoms include stomach pain, vomiting or nausea, diarrhea, and unexplained weight loss.

The only way to treat celiac disease is to adopt a gluten-free diet. If left unmanaged, it can cause malnutrition, fatigue, osteoporosis, and anemia. Understanding these risks could help doctors predict and detect celiac disease before these complications arise.

This research could provide insight into other autoimmune diseases. According to van Heel, there may be reason to believe the same immune disturbances used to detect celiac disease could also potentially be used to predict type 1 diabetes.

The study appears in the February 28 edition of Nature Genetics.