Article Text
Abstract
Objective and methods: To characterise the epidemiological features of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) in the Japanese population, this study performed a nationwide assessment of the prevalence and incidence rates in Japan.
Results: The prevalence rate per 100 000 was 1.61 in the total population; 2.01 in males and 1.23 in females. The age dependent prevalence rates were 0.23 in juveniles (<15 years old), 1.50 in young adults (15–55 years) and 2.31 in elderly adults (>55 years). The sex and age dependent prevalence rates were 0.22 in males and 0.24 in females in juveniles, 1.81 in males and 1.19 in females in young adults, and 3.12 in males and 1.64 in females in elderly adults. The annual incidence rate per 100 000 was 0.48 in the total population, 0.58 in males and 0.38 in females. The age dependent incidence rate was 0.06 in juveniles, 0.40 in young adults and 0.73 in elderly adults. The sex and age dependent incidence rate was 0.05 in males and 0.08 in females in juveniles, 0.50 in males and 0.30 in females in young adults, and 0.93 in males and 0.58 in females in elderly adults. Both the prevalence and incidence rates were very similar throughout the eight geographical areas studied, from the northern to the southern parts of Japan.
Conclusions: The prevalence and incidence rates were similar to those reported in the Caucasian population. The pathogenic background is suggested to be common throughout the different races and geographic areas, while gender and age effects should be taken into account in the pathogenesis of CIDP.
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Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) is a motor and sensory neuropathy with an immune mediated inflammatory element. The clinical course is divergent, taking chronic, progressive, recurrent and regressive courses; the clinical symptoms of the motor and sensory modality and its symptomatic distribution are also divergent.1 2 The therapeutic efficacies of intravenous immunoglobulin therapy, plasma exchange and corticosteroid therapy have been established in large scale case controlled studies.3 4 Well recognised diagnostic criteria, a thorough understanding of the pathophysiology of the disease and beneficial therapeutics have led to the acceptance of CIDP as a clinical entity.1 5 6 However, the epidemiology of CIDP has been rarely investigated, and thus this information is lacking, particularly in Asian populations.
In this study, the prevalence and incidence rates of CIDP in the Japanese population were determined, particularly as they relate to geographical, gender and age related distributions; these data were also compared with those from Caucasian populations.
METHODS
Data for a nationwide survey were collected according to previously described methods.7 8 As this study included paediatric and internal medicine clinics as well as neurology clinics, we collected patients with CIDP who were diagnosed by the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) criteria,9 Saperstein’s modified criteria10 and the inflammatory neuropathy cause and treatment (INCAT) criteria.4 We reviewed each patient’s data and ascertained if the patient fulfilled these diagnostic criteria. Patients with diabetes mellitus (17.2% of collected patients), hereditary diseases and obvious paraproteinaemia were excluded from the study.
As CIDP is a chronic disease and persists in its symptoms for more than 1 year in most patients, we computed prevalence and incidence rates for 1 year of data collection.11 We first compiled a list of all of the hospitals in Japan with 20 or more beds from data reported by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry in Japan. The majority of the patients with CIDP (almost 95% of the patients in the preliminary survey in the Aichi prefecture in Japan) are seen in neurology clinics of general city hospitals, or the department of neurology or department of paediatrics of university hospitals in Japan; all of these hospitals and facilities with more than 20 beds in the whole of Japan were included in this survey. A few patients with CIDP (less than 5% of the patients in the preliminary survey in the Aichi prefecture in Japan) are seen in internal medicine or paediatric clinics of the city hospitals, and thus we selected the hospitals of internal medicine and paediatrics for data sampling according to the previously described randomised selection procedure. In brief: 5% of those hospitals with 20–99 beds, 10% of those with 100–199 beds, 20% of those with 200–299 beds, 40% of those with 300–399 beds, 80% of those with 400–499 beds and 100% of the hospitals with 500 or more beds.7 8 For departments of neurology, we selected all hospitals because we speculated that most patients with CIDP should be correctly diagnosed by neurologists. We classified all hospitals into 30 strata depending on the type of clinical department and the size of the hospital (see supplementary table 1 online). We sent questionnaires directly to the physicians of the departments of neurology, paediatrics and internal medicine in these hospitals, and independently to each hospital, asking each for the number, gender and other clinical and experimental information of patients who were newly diagnosed as CIDP (incidence number) or had been already diagnosed as CIDP and were still receiving treatment (prevalence number) over 1 year, from the beginning of September 2004 to the end of August 2005. We also asked how they diagnosed the patients as having CIDP by referring to the diagnostic criteria of the AAN research criteria, Saperstein’s modified criteria, the INCAT criteria and other diagnostic backgrounds.10 12 In addition, we obtained information on the gender and age distribution of the Japanese population in each prefecture based on the national census (October 2005). We calculated the number of patients with CIDP in each stratum and extrapolated the prevalence and incidence figures based on the response rates to the questionnaire and the population statistics. To calculate the geographical distribution, we arranged 47 prefectures into eight areas from the north to the south of Japan and assessed the prevalence and incidence rates based on the population in each area.
This study was performed as a project study in the Refractory Peripheral Neuropathy Research Study Group, under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of Japan. The study design was agreed upon and approved by the Ethics Committee of Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine.
RESULTS
The study received 1561 responses to the questionnaire out of 2827 surveyed facilities, for a total net recovery rate of 55.2%; 51.8% of the neurology clinics, 41.8% of the clinics of internal medicine and 70.1% of the paediatric clinics (see supplementary table 1 online). From September 2004 to August 2005, 742 men and 480 women were diagnosed with CIDP in the 1561 medical facilities out of the total of 2827 randomly selected surveyed hospitals in Japan having more than 20 beds. Based on these data, and the response rates from each stratum of the facilities, we obtained a prevalence number of 2433 patients (1495 men and 938 women) (see supplementary table 2 online). The CIDP prevalence rate per 100 000 of the Japanese population was 1.61 in the total population, 2.01 in the male population and 1.23 in the female population (table 1). The age dependent prevalence rate was 0.23 in juveniles, 1.50 in young adults and 2.31 in elderly adults. The sex dependent prevalence rate in each age group was 0.22 in males and 0.24 in females in juveniles, 1.81 in males and 1.19 in females in young adults, and 3.12 in males and 1.64 in females in elderly adults. The number of newly diagnosed patients with CIDP during the year from September 2004 to August 2005 was 601 (354 men and 247 women) (see supplementary table 3 online). The annual incidence rate per 100 000 was 0.48 in the total population, 0.58 in males and 0.38 in females. The age dependent annual incidence rate was 0.06 in juveniles, 0.40 in young adults and 0.73 in elderly adults. The sex dependent incidence rate in each group was 0.05 in males and 0.08 in females in juveniles, 0.50 in males and 0.30 in females in young adults, and 0.93 in males and 0.58 in females in elderly adults (table 1).
Additionally, there was no difference in the prevalence or the incidence rates in the total population in eight geographical areas (Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kanto, Koshin-etsu, Tokai, Kinki, Chugoku-Shikoku and Kyushu-Okinawa) in Japan (fig 1).
DISCUSSION
The higher prevalence and incidence rates in males compared with females, and the increasing rates with aging were the major observations of the Japanese epidemiology of CIDP, as was the lack of a specific geographical distribution. As CIDP is a chronic disease generally lasting more than 1 year, our results on observations over 1 year are expected to represent the transverse epidemiology in the Japanese population.
A few well designed epidemiological studies have been reported from the UK, Australia and the north of Italy in Caucasian populations.13–15 The most striking finding was that our data in the Japanese population were similar to those reported in these Caucasian populations (table 2). Compared with the UK–Australian data, we found epidemiological similarity in the total prevalence and incidence rates, male predominance over females, and the higher prevalence and incidence rates in the adult population compared with the juvenile population, although the ages categorising their juvenile populations were different to ours. The prevalence rate in northern Italy was slightly higher than ours (table 2), while the increasing prevalence and incidence rates in their elderly populations were similar to ours. The prevalence and incidence rates in our study may be somewhat underestimated as we excluded patients with diabetes mellitus or paraproteinaemia; these data were also collected in a hospital based manner, excluding those under home care or under private office follow-up not attending hospital during the survey period. Another source of bias is that we would have missed patients who were diagnosed before the survey, but who did not attend hospital during the survey period, which may have occurred because their disease was too mild, or patients were too ill or did not see any point in attending because their treatment was not helping.
In addition, our results clearly demonstrate that there is no significant preponderance in the geographical distribution from the north to the south of Japan for the epidemiology of CIDP. These results suggest that CIDP is similar in its epidemiological background in different races and different geographical environments, indicating that the pathogenesis of CIDP could be common worldwide, and independent of genetic and geographical environmental influences, although further studies are needed to confirm this.
Another interesting observation was the gender related difference in the prevalence and incidence rates. In the adult population, prevalence and incidence rates were significantly higher in males; the male to female ratio was 1.63 to 1 (1.52 to 1 in young adults and 1.90 to 1 in elderly adults) for the prevalence rate and 1.56 to 1 (1.67 to 1 in young adults and 1.60 to 1 in elderly adults) for the incidence rate. Whereas in the juvenile population a significant preponderance was observed in girls, the male to female ratio was 0.92 to 1 for the prevalence rate and 0.63 to 1 for the incidence rate. At present we do not understand the background mechanism underlying this gender related difference, particularly its reversed ratio among the adult and juvenile populations.11 16 However, the gender and age related differences in the epidemiological indices were remarkable, especially given their reversal during puberty, suggesting that the effects of gender could be significant in the pathogenesis of CIDP.
Appendix
Members of the Refractory Peripheral Neuropathy Research Study Group of Japan
S Yagihashi, Department of Pathology, Hirosaki University School of Medicine, Hirosaki, Japan; T Yamamura, Department of Immunology, National Institute of Neuroscience, NCNP, Kodaira, Japan; S Ikeda, Department of Neurology, Shinshu University School of Medicine, Matsumoto, Japan; M Nakagawa, Department of Pathology and Applied Neurobiology, Graduate School of Medical Science, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Kyoto, Japan; S Kusunoki, Department of Neurology, Kinki University School of Medicine, Osaka, Japan; K Inoue, Department of Mental Retardation and Birth Defect Research, National Centre of Neurology and Psychiatry, Kodaira, Japan; K Hayasaka, Department of Pediatrics, Yamagata University School of Medicine, Yamagata, Japan; K Matsumura, Department of Neurology and Neuroscience, Teikyo University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan; Y Ando, Department of Cell Pathology, Graduate School of Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan; M Baba, Department of Neurology, Hirosaki University School of Medicine, Hirosaki, Japan; M Nakazato, Department of Neurology, Respirology, Endocrinology and Metabolism, Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Miyazaki, Miyazaki, Japan; H Yasuda, Division of Neurology, Department of Medicine, Shiga University of Medical Science, Shiga, Japan; R Kaji, Department of Neurology, University of Tokushima, Faculty of Medicine, Tokushima, Japan; O Onodera, Department of Neurology, Clinical Neuroscience Branch, Niigata University Brain Research Institute, Niigata, Japan; J Kira, Department of Neurology, Neurological Institute, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan; S Kuwabara, Department of Neurology, Chiba University Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba, Japan; K Arimura, Department of Neurology and Geriatrics, Kagoshima University Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences, Kagoshima University, Kagoshima, Japan; G Sobue, Department of Neurology, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan.
REFERENCES
Supplementary materials
web only tables 79/9/1040
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Footnotes
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Competing interests: None.
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Funding: This study was supported by the grants from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of Japan.
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Ethics approval: The study design was agreed upon and approved by the Ethics Committee of Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine.