Many patients with celiac disease experience malabsorption, weight loss, and anemia.
Undiagnosed celiac disease during pregnancy has been linked with adverse outcomes.
Studies of celiac disease and congenital malformations in offspring have been underpowered.
Dr Jonas Ludvigsson and colleagues investigated the risk of congenital malformations among the offspring of parents with celiac disease.
The researchers performed a nationwide cohort study of data from linked health care registers in Sweden from 1973 through 2009.
The team collected histopathology data from 28 pathology departments in Sweden to identify individuals with celiac disease.
|There were 6% of cases of malformation in offspring of mothers with celiac disease |
|Clinical Gastroenterology & Hepatology|
The team estimated the risks of malformations in the offspring of mothers and fathers with and without celiac disease.
Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted prevalence odds ratios (aPORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs).
The team found that among 11,382 offspring of mothers with celiac disease, there were 6% of cases of malformation compared with 5% of cases among 40,922 offspring of mothers without celiac disease.
Similarly, 6% of 6002 offspring of fathers with celiac disease and 5% of 19,600 offspring of fathers without celiac disease had a malformation.
In adjusted analyses, the offspring of mothers or fathers with celiac disease had a slightly increased risk of having children with malformations.
However, these excess risks decreased or vanished entirely when the team restricted their data to births since 2000.
Dr Ludvigsson's team concludes, "In a nationwide study, we found an increased risk for malformation among the offspring of mothers or fathers with celiac disease."
"However, the excess risk is small, and the upper limits of the CIs for malformation indicate a 29% maximum relative increase."