speech delay and g.i. connection PLEASE READ

[Guest guest]

I orginally posted this on the celiac board, but I wish everyone with

an autistic, speech delayed, or sensory intergration disordered child

would read it, because that's what my daughter HAD. (she's still got

a speech delay, but not like before...please read on (the autistic

tendancies and Sensory problems are GONE! Yeah!)

Subject: IMO biopsy and testing aren't as important as.....

your very own observations.

My little girl was originally label autistic, but after an OT advised

us to

explore food allergies which led us to a GI and the gluten free diet

(which I had SERIOUS doubts about), after two weeks on the diet,

this totally non verbal two and a half year old started to babble, 4

weeks in she was saying words.

Within days (the first few she just

cried and had temper tantrums) but within days her glassy, hazy eyes

seemed to focus and she made eye contact. She stopped eating like a

horse and ate like a normal person. This little girl who couldn't

stand to be touched, couldn't stand the feeling of her clothes or

any even slightly loud sound is now doing amazing well and is no

longer the child she was, she looks at us, talks to us, and is VERY

affectionate, where before we couldnt even touch her.

Her body has

gone from 22 to almost 40 pounds in less than two years, her ribs no

longer stick out, her belly no longer looks pregnant, and she

finally has some muscle tone. She is no longer considered autistic,

but does still have some lingering developmental delays, such as

speech and fine and gross motos skills, that seems to be due from

the malabsorption she experienced from the time she went on table

food as a baby until she got gluten free.

my then two year old daughter had two biopsies, which is supposed to

be the definative way to diagnose celiac disease. Her villi seemed

intact. Her IGG and AGG were slighltly elevated. By the textbook,

since her biopsy seemed normal, she didn't have celiac, however,

both times she went off of her gluten free diet, her strange symtoms

IMMEDIATELY returned. Her doctor told us that we should keep her on

a gluten free diet for life, that her case was very unusual, but he

saw with his own eyes what gluten did to her each time she ate it

for two weeks. He officially calls her " totally gluten

intollerant " I'm just posting this because I want people to know

that the tests are not necesarilly 100 percent. Here's what happens

to her if she eats just a speck of wheat or other gluten containing

food, even if she puts a sticker in her mouth

bad burning red rash on her cheeks.

stomach aches

bad, bad diarrhea

spacy, glassy look in her eyes,

severe ADD symptoms

lack of speech (she's speech delayed, but her speech is even more

slurred and murky when eating gluten)

lack of impulse control

loose, foul smelling stools that often have undigested food in them

I'm sorry for such a long post, but I just want to get our story out

[Guest guest]

what is the guleten free diet?

[Guest guest]

> what is the guleten free diet?

www.celiac.com

Traci

[Guest guest]

Gluten is a protein found in grains, wheat, rye oats and barley. The

hard part is, so many food additives and fillers are derivatives of

these grains, so a gluten free diet isn't the easiest thing to

follow. Many kids with developmental delays may have an inability to

tolerate gluten, when the body encounters gluten, there is an

autoimmune reaction (when the body doesn't recognize it's own cells

and starts killing them off like invaders) and this make the kids

intestines not absorb vitamins correctly.

We try to give my daughter whole foods, nothing processed, she lives

on salad, chicken, rice, eggs, plain vegetables. She cannot eat

regular bread, but we get bread from our local health food store made

of soy or rice or potato flour. if you do a google search on gluten-

free, you'll find much more information. I really believe that if I

didn't discover this diet, my daughter would be non verbal still.

She still has speech delays, she is almost 4 1/2 and puts together

long sentences, but she leaves out letters and shortens words still.

but she's come a long way! we can understand about 50-75 precent of

what she says. I think the gluten caused malabsorption of vital

nutrients while she was younger and this affected her brain. I think

the damage would have continued had we not found this diet. Please

read up on it, it's worth a try, it's free, you don't have to go to

the doctor or anything, it's healthy and you can find so much

information on the web, and if you're careful about what you buy, you

can feed your child foods found right in the supermarket.

Good luck!

In , " Baudin "

<j_cipriano@h...> wrote:

> what is the guleten free diet?