Why Should Your Family Members Be Tested for Celiac Disease? Ep. 78

If you have a family member with Celiac Disease, do you also need to be tested?
What if you don't even have symptoms of Celiac Disease?
You will find the answers in this episode.

Or perhaps you have Celiac Disease and have a family member not wanting to be tested.  This is the perfect episode to share with them to motivate them to take the time for testing.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:24

Hello and welcome to this week's episode. Thank you for tuning into the show. Now, you may be listening to this because a loved one cares about you and wants to do the best for you and your health. So if you're being forced to listen to my voice, thank you, I appreciate you. Your loved one appreciates you and thanks you. But if you're listening to this by choice, then even better welcome. Thank you for being here. Now I am sharing this episode because I have so many people reach out to me and share with me that they have celiac disease and they've listened to my episodes where I say that it's recommended that loved ones, so people that are immediate family members get tested for celiac disease. And then when they say like, share this information with their loved ones, they flat out refuse to be tested. They are given, I guess, feedback such as, I don't wanna know if I've got celiac disease. I would die if I had celiac disease. I would die if I had to eat gluten free food. I don't wanna know about it. Okay, so these are some of the things that you may have said to your family member that cares about you, or you may have just been told that you need to get tested and you don't really know much about it. So I wanna share with you today a little bit of information just to motivate you, I guess, to do the best thing for your health. Now, I can share that my daughter, she is currently 15, she has said things like this to me, and it's really hard to hear because when you care about somebody, you just want them to be their healthiest, don't you? You just want the best for your loved ones. So when my daughter was quite young, we had some issues with behavior and some different things going on. They weren't necessarily, um, worn like red flags for celiac disease, but they were still symptoms of what could be celiac disease. So she had some tests done, and I had blood tests done for her when she was young, and it showed that she has the genetic marker for celiac disease. But her bloods didn't show that she had celiac disease. It wasn't triggered. So at that point in time, she was fine. And then moving on years and years and years later, she was having some skin issues with her hands. Um, no doctor, no specialist could explain what was going on. We couldn't work it out. And again, I wondered if it was to do with gluten, whether it was to do with celiac disease. Um, they even thought that perhaps she had rheumatoid

Speaker 2: 3:22

Arthritis, which was just heartbreaking because she was a very passionate gymnast at the time. So it could have related to her gymnastics. We just didn't know. But either way, it turned out that we got more blood tests done. Again, she was fine, obviously still has the gene for celiac disease because that doesn't go away. If you've got the genetic marker for celiac disease, that's, that's basically in you forever. You may or may not get celiac disease triggered. Okay? So that genetic marker gets passed down from your parents or one parent and it can sit there dormant in your body and you may never get celiac disease, or you may go through a time in your life that actually basically turns it on. It's like a switch. It can be turned on. So for me, I can look back and I can see that childbirth triggered mine and my symptoms slowly started after childbirth. And it wasn't really until I stopped breastfeeding my daughter, that those, um, I guess warning signs and those symptoms were full blown. And I could see that there was something very, very wrong with me. So if you have a loved one that has said to you, you need to get tested for celiac disease, you might have this playing on your mind and you might be thinking, Oh my God,<laugh>, like, I've got this symptom. Maybe it's celiac disease, maybe it's not. I don't wanna know about it. But what if you decided to go and get tested and you didn't even have the genetic marker for celiac disease? You can rule it out, then you don't have to think about it. You don't have to spend the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years thinking, what if maybe I did have celiac disease or you get cancer and you didn't know about it. It's very serious. It is a very serious diagnosis to ignore. But you could rule it out in one blood test. You could go along, you could have a blood test, and you can be told straight away, as soon as you get those results back, nope, you don't have celiac disease. Okay? Simple as that. You're gonna get your family member off your back. You're not gonna have to worry about it anymore. You're not, not even gonna have to think about it ever again. Because if you don't have that genetic marker, you will never suddenly get celiac disease. You have to have the genetic marker before you can actually get celiac disease. Or you might have the genetic marker and then via the blood test, your doctor or your primary caregiver can say yes or no, whether you have celiac disease. So just because you've got the genetic market doesn't mean that it's turned on. Doesn't mean that you've got it. It could mean that maybe later on you could get celiac disease, but it could mean at this point in time you don't. All right? It's very interesting. It's very interesting to think

Speaker 3: 6:21

About. And I can tell you, you will not die if you get a diagnosis for celiac disease and have to eat gluten-free. You can do it gluten-free. Food is not that bad, I promise you. It is not that bad. If you think it's bad, you've obviously eaten someone bad cooking. So<laugh>, there's lots of amazing gluten free food. And I can share with you that my older brother, he used to make these comments to me all the time as well. He refused to go get tested. Um, he used to make ridiculous comments about not giving up beer and about not giving up gluten and that life wouldn't be worth living and all this nonsense. I can tell you that my brother is a whole different person since he got a celiac diagnosis. He is so much healthier, so much happier, so much more energetic, and he denied it. For years, I, I told him to go and get tested constantly. Every time he would whinge about something to do with his body, I'd say to him, You need to go get tested for celiac disease. You need to go and find out. Nah, nah, nah, I'm not, no, no, I'm not giving up gluten. So<laugh>, that's pretty much how it sounded. So it is something that if you do get a diagnosis, you may feel so much better. So many people live with celiac disease and don't even realize how crappy they feel until they get a diagnosis. You might think that there's nothing wrong with you, but it's not until you get a diagnosis and you cut out gluten that you go, Wow, is this how I am supposed to feel? Because you've lived with the symptoms for so long that they are just there. My mom has had celiac disease her whole life. She didn't get a diagnosis until she was an adult. And my nan and my aunties would say, without a shadow of a doubt bond. My mom, she had celiac disease as a child, she missed out on so much because she was so unwell all the time. She'd lay her bed with major stomach cramps that they put down to other girly issues. She would be the one that would miss out on events because she was so unwell. So it can get worse. It can cause further issues if you don't get a diagnosis, if you have celiac disease that has been triggered and you're living with celiac disease, the crazy thing is you may not even have symptoms. Okay? Some people have celiac disease without symptoms. And to me, I think that's a bit of a curse. I think it's worse than having symptoms because you're less likely to do something about it. But the problem is there is still damage going on in your body, okay? And what happens is, if you continue to eat gluten, when you have celiac disease, your body is continuously attacking itself. Your small intestine

Speaker 4: 9:19

Is continuously being damaged. And what happens is your body is in this state of inflammation and your body continues to go downhill. And it may take years and years and years of this damage, but it leads to further implications. Think about the impact of what can happen down the track. You may be a teenager and be thinking you're invincible, or you may be 70 and thinking, Oh, I've lived my life. Who cares? What's it gonna matter now? But if you have family that cares about you, they want you here, they want you here living a healthy life. They don't want you suffering from cancer. They don't want you getting other autoimmune diseases because you haven't looked after yourself. So please, I beg of you. Go and get a blood test. Go and get tested. I'm getting emotional talking about this because I think of all the years that my brother lost when he could have gone and got a diagnosis. So please do yourself a favor. Do your loved one a favor. Just book in, Get a blood test, rule it out perhaps, or find out whether you've got the gene and it's dormant, or whether you've actually got celiac disease. But it's, it's not gonna take you long, and it could change your life for the better. So I hope this episode has made an impact. I hope that you've taken on board what I've shared. I am very passionate about this, and it's my mission to make people's lives better. And through this platform with this is how I do it. So thank you. And yeah, just, just do it for your loved one. Hmm. All right. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.