Half a million people. That’s pretty close to the population of Sacramento. It’s also the estimated number of adults living with chronic urticaria in the United States, according to analysis of a database including over 55 million individuals.
That cross-sectional analysis put the overall standardized at 309.3 per 100,000 (0.31%) and men well below at 145.5 per 100,000 (0.15%), Sara Wertenteil, BA, and her associates at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y., wrote in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
Overall prevalence of chronic urticaria was similar for all age groups, ranging from 0.21% for those aged 18-29 years and those aged 30-39 years to 0.26% for those aged 40-49, and prevalence was higher for females than males in all age groups, the investigators reported.
“Epidemiologic studies estimating disease burden for chronic urticaria are sparse, [but this study] is based on one of the largest and most ethnically diversified population samples in the United States. It is also drawn from patients with all insurance types and self-pay patients across various types of health care settings and from all census regions,” Ms. Wertenteil and her associates wrote.
The study involved an IBM Watson Health database encompassing 27 participating integrated health care organizations and representing approximately 17% of the population. The analysis identified 69,570 adult patients with chronic urticaria, and the ratio of women to men was 2.7:1.
The senior author, Amit Garg, MD, has served as an advisor for AbbVie, Pfizer, Janssen, and Asana Biosciences.
SOURCE: Wertenteil S et al. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2019. doi: 10.1016/j.jaad.2019.02.064.