As our October “Hot Topic,” George Philips presented a paper published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, A prospective study of duodenal bulb biopsy in newly diagnosed and established adult celiac disease (PMID 21606978) on the benefit of taking duodenal bulb biopsies when assessing for celiac disease.
There were several limitations to this paper. The population from which patients were prospectively recruited included mostly patients in whom Celiac disease was suspected, and in a more diverse patient population, there could be false positives due to etiologies other than celiac disease. In this study, the pathologists were not blinded at the time of their assessment of the duodenal bulb biopsies.
The expert clinicians in the room at journal club agreed that this paper would not cause them to change clinical practice.