CYSTIC FIBROSIS OF THE PANCREAS AND ITS RELATION TO CELIAC DISEASE

The pathology and pathologic physiology of celiac disease remain obscure in spite of the many attempts that have been made to understand them. It has become clearer in recent years that celiac disease is a clinical picture "characterized by arrest of growth, a distended abdomen, and attacks of diarrhoea with large, pale, foul-smelling stools"¹rather than a disease entity and that the underlying pathologic condition may differ in different cases.²A tradition exists that pancreatic steatorrhea can be readily differentiated from idiopathic steatorrhea by the low percentage of split fat in the stools associated with the former and the normal percentage characterizing the latter. A careful survey of the literature, however, reveals few cases of either disease in which careful clinical observations have been followed by adequate postmortem examination. The present study was initiated because of the findings in case 44 (XX), in which a patient with celiac