Fig. 1.

Diagram of the patient flow through the study. Ninety-one Rome III fulfilling patients with self-reported weekly symptoms entered a 4-week observation period during which 45 (49 %) were excluded due to improvement or lack of weekly symptoms (15 patients) and other mainly personal reasons (30 patients). The remaining 46 patients entered a diagnostic stage during which 11 (24 %) were excluded due to a new diagnosis. The remaining 35 patients entered the trial stage. Depicted here is the result of the 75 % criterion (“considerably relieved” or “completely relieved” at 75 % of the time during the GFD). According to this, 12 patients were classified as responders and 23 patients as non-responders with no correlation between response to GFD and HLA-DQ2/8 status