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Lies, damned lies, and gluten sensitivity – a story of statistics

Lies, damned lies, and gluten sensitivity – a story of statistics

The recent study by Di Sabatino and colleagues DOES NOT demonstrate the existence of gluten sensitivity. Although the authors report that “the severity of overall symptoms increased significantly during 1 week of intake of small amounts of gluten, compared with placebo,” it simply turns out that 3 of 59 participants reacted strongly enough during their gluten challenges to skew the group results in favor of gluten sensitivity. Taken on their own, however, we cannot diagnose these individuals with gluten sensitivity because they did not complete the required number of gluten and placebo challenges.