Study alludes to greater celiac incidence in the US

In order to ascertain why celiac disease (CD) is an increasingly common disease that may affect as many as 1% of the North American population, researchers in a American Journal of Gastroenterology study used the active duty US military, a unique healthy worker population with essentially complete medical diagnostic coding, as an opportunity to describe trends in CD and deployment-related risk factors. The incidence of CD increased five-fold from 1.3 per 100,000 in 1999 to 6.5 per 100,000 in 2008, with the highest rates of increase among those over 34 years of age. If incidence of CD diagnosis in the US military rose that fast, and is six times higher than other population-based estimates, does this mean the estimates of general population are not accurate? We think so.