Celiac disease in Iran: a systematic review and meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION: Celiac disease (CD) is a chronic autoimmune-mediated disorder with both intestinal and systemic manifestations. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of celiac disease in Iran. METHODS: We conducted a systematic search on Embase, Pub Med, Web of Science, Google Scholar, MagIran, Scientific Information database (SID) and Iranmedex from 2003 through to November 2015. The Der-Simonian/Laird’s (DL), with a 95% confidence interval employed to estimate the overall pooled prevalence. Heterogeneity was investigated by using subgroup analysis based on sample size and time of study. RESULTS: Sixty-three studies with 36,833 participants met inclusion criteria for analysis. The overall prevalence of celiac disease in 63 studies that had used serological tests for the diagnosis was observed as 3% (95% CI: 0.03–0.03) and the overall prevalence of celiac disease in studies that had used biopsy method for diagnosis was observed as 2% (95% CI: 0.01–0.02). CONCLUSION: The prevalence of celiac disease in Iran was similar or even higher than world-wide reported.