Toddler must repeat painful tests after hospital let blood samples sit too long, mother says

A Quebec mother says her daughter has to redo three months of difficult testing for celiac disease, after the Montreal Children's Hospital failed to test her initial samples.

Natasha Contardi knew her daughter Teagan had a problem with gluten from birth.

“She wasn’t gaining weight properly, and we figured out along the way it was gluten, wheat products, that was not making her well from breast milk,” Contardi said.

She says she put her daughter, now three years old, on a gluten-free diet. She tried introducing some gluten with solid foods, but Teagan never seemed to tolerate it.

Contardi says she was curious to find out if her daughter was simply gluten intolerant, or actually had celiac disease.

“There is a difference between eating gluten-free and eating gluten-free for celiac disease,” Contardi said. “Someone with celiac disease, a crumb of toast getting into her mouth could make her sick for days.”

She said if Teagan had celiac, gluten could physically damage her intestinal lining. But if she were gluten intolerant, it would simply make her uncomfortable.

Finally, this January, Contardi met with a pediatric gastroenterologist at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, and decided to go through with tests for celiac disease. She said Teagan had already tested positive for the celiac gene, and she wanted to confirm it with blood tests, and then an endoscopy if blood tests were inconclusive.

Doctors said her daughter had to have gluten in her system for the blood tests, otherwise, she might have a false negative. So Contardi had to put Teagan through 12 weeks of eating gluten in order to do the blood tests.