Bozorg SR, Söderling J, Everhov AH, et al. - Before being diagnosed with celiac disease (CD), celiac patients missed more workdays than their peers, and this trend continued after diagnosis. Identifying patients at high risk of job loss may serve as a target for reducing work disability and, as a result, reduce job loss in CD.

• The authors identified 16,005 working-age patients with prevalent CD (villus atrophy) as of January 1, 2015, using biopsy reports from Sweden's 28 pathology departments, and 4,936 incident patients diagnosed with CD between 2008 and 2015.

• Patients with prevalent CD had a mean of 42.5 lost workdays in 2015, compared to 28.6 in comparison groups, representing a 49% relative increase.

• More than half of celiac patients' work loss (60.1%) was attributed to a small subgroup (7%), while 75.4% had no work loss.

• The annual mean difference between incident patients and comparators was 8.0 lost workdays 5 years before CD diagnosis, which increased to 13.7 days 5 years after diagnosis.

• At the follow-up, there was no difference in work loss between patients with and without mucosal healing.