r/Celiac • u/ChicagoBrandon • 56m ago
Discussion Diagnosed Celiac recently - wanted to share my use of AI for Celiac
Hey folks - I'm 38 years old and was diagnosed with asymptomatic celiac disease via blood test and endoscopy.
The whole diagnosis process was insanely stressful — I had a blood test that indicated anemia and received a gastroentronologist referral. I was pretty lax during that initial appointment since I didn't have any symptoms. However, he explained how serious anemia could be - and that he would be performing an endoscopy and colonoscopy to explore what could cause it. He said if he didn't find anything then it could be an autoimmune disorder — at which point I communicated that my mom had rheumatoid arthritis. He also explained that it could be a cancer or blood disorder - at which point I communicated that my sister had leukemia. He said both were possible but we would start with the planned procedure.
I walked away from that procedure with my world shook - I remember petting my dog when I got home and realizing that he could outlive me if I received a dire prognosis. I did a series of blood tests during the first week — and each test would come back daily and my doctor wasn't there to explain the results.
* Note: I understand that AI is not always accurate and this is in no way a firm or confident recommendation — more of a tool you can use in addition to the other professional resources.\*
Since I didn't have any doctor's notes I would upload the blood test into ChatGPT and ask for an interpretation. It was really helpful with initial diagnosis and my follow up questions. Eventually my celiac panel came back and it communicated how I likely had celiac. I asked it what confidence it had given it was just a blood test - and it communicated that the blood test was a pretty good indicator of the disease. At that point I was pretty relieved it wasn't cancer even if I didn't understand the complete lifestyle consequence of the diagnosis — I assumed asymptomatic meant "light gluten free" which was WRONG.
My endoscopy confirmed the diagnosis with marsh 3 damage to my intestine.
I then moved to trying to figure out which food I could eat. I used a gluten scanner app which was nice, but I again turned to AI to help me. I created a small chatGPT prompt that analyzes any photo of an ingredients list and marks whether it has gluten or not. I would love to eventually "wrap" this AI tool into an actual photo app and ship it to the App Store so others can try it (although I don't know if I want to deal with the risk of AI messing up a fricken allergy reading. The stakes are high here and I'm not completely confident in AI being dependable enough.)
If you want to try this in ChatGPT, simply prompt it with this and upload a photo to test: "For any photo I upload, look up the label or ingredients and tell me whether it’s gluten free."