With a life-long gluten-free diet, celiac disease is completely curable and patients are at no more at risk for complications than healthy people.
But untreated celiac disease can cause a variety of complications, which are by the time of occurrence divided into short, medium and long term effects.
Short-term complications include bloating, gas, flatulence, weight loss, hair loss, skin inflammation, burning tongue sensation, general fatigue, etc., since the food is digested poorly, as a result of damage to the lining of the gastrointestinal tract.
The medium-term complications arise due to the lack of absorption of nutrients from food. We are talking mostly about anaemia due to iron deficiency, or vitamin B group deficiency, not so much about osteoporosis, etc.
The long-term complications, which pose the most danger to patients with celiac disease, are various autoimmune and cancerous disorders. Neither type is very common, but in patients with celiac these diseases occur significantly more than in healthy people. It is estimated that the mortality of patients with celiac disease is 1.3-times higher than that of the average population.
In those suffering from celiac disease, the most common autoimmune diseases are the autoimmune inflammation of the thyroid, vitiligo, diabetes mellitus, systemic connective tissue diseases, autoimmune hepatitis, etc.
Cancer often affects the digestive tract, so after the age of 40 it is also important to perform preventive endoscopic examinations (gastroscopy, colonoscopy). Due to the constant stimulation of the immune system in untreated celiac disease, a lymphoma often develops, particularly the enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma in the small intestine (EATL).