Gastroenterology/Nutrition

Conquering celiac disease

Although my husband called her “Smiley,” our happy baby, Erica, was clingy and cranky. For two months, we cleaned up after our 22-month-old as she vomited every day and watched in growing alarm as her tummy grew more and more distended, while her arm and leg muscles atrophied. Her pediatrician thought she had a virus, but she wasn’t getting any better. After four weeks, he referred us to Children’s Hospital Boston, where her gastrointestinal doctor suspected celiac disease.

At Children’s Hospital Boston, we aim to solve some of the world’s greatest pediatric health problems. Some ways we do this stem from scientific research: Understanding diseases deeply—even at the cellular or molecular level—leads to new drugs and therapies. Other discoveries arise from moments spent at patients’ bedsides, when doctors and nurses see opportunities to improve care. This approach, which we call “clinical innovations,” often requires us to develop entirely new tools or come up with inventive strategies. This creative form of innovation is the path by which many major improvements in health care have been made.

At Children’s Hospital Boston, we believe that patients and families deserve to know whether the hospital where they have chosen to receive their care meets the highest standards and is committed to excellence.  Through our Program for Patient Safety and Quality, we continually monitor and improve the care we provide to our patients. Since the diseases and chronic conditions that affect children and adolescents are quite different from those of adults, it is often not appropriate to use adult measures to evaluate the quality of pediatric care.  That’s why we have taken a leadership role in developing scientifically sound methods to measure the quality of care provided to all children and adolescents.