Professor Ludvig Sollid and his team at the University of Oslo have discovered that coeliac sufferers have one of two defective human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) which cause the immune system to see gluten molecules as dangerous, triggering an immune response which causes severe inflammation and other symptoms.
“When a person who has coeliac disease eats gluten, the immune system reacts to gluten as if it were a virus or a bacterium,” Sollid told Norway’s NRK. “It attacks the gluten, and part of this attack causes the immune system attacks the body itself.”
HLAs are proteins which act as markers, binding to fragments of other proteins, and so telling white blood cells called T-cells how to treat them. The defective HLAs bind to fragments of gluten, fooling the T-cells into thinking they are bacteria or viruses....
