Epidemiology of atopic dermatitis in Europe

Abstract

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory disease persisting predominantly in the pediatric population. Its development is most presumably multifactorial and a derivative of interplay between genetic, immunologic, and environmental causes. To the authors' knowledge, no multinational and systematic database of AD prevalence is established and maintained for Europe. Thus, epidemiologic data originating from the multinational studies was compiled to draw a picture of AD in both pediatric and adult populations in Europe. The outcomes of this exercise support the general observation that AD prevalence follows the latitudinal pattern with higher prevalence values in northern Europe and decreases progressively towards southern Europe. Noteworthy, the data shows significant differences on the country-level, with higher prevalence in municipal areas than rural. Finally, and unsurprisingly, the collected data reinforces the observation of AD prevalence being highest in pediatric populations in contrast to adults. Herein, data presented was additionally supplemented with the information on current standing on AD etiology.

Keywords: Dermatitis; atopic; epidemiologic studies; humans.

Figure 1.

Epidemiology of AD for the 13–14 years age group (Denmark: 12–16 years) and adults according to outcomes from multinational epidemiological research programs^8–10 complemented with input for Hungary, Serbia, and the Ukraine from KCR local resources (data marked as “local”). Each country has in brackets a reference of data cited for the 13–14 years age group (left) and adults (right).