Health Insurance Data Confirm High Prevalence of Multiple Sclerosis

Introduction: Social and economic consequences of multiple sclerosis (MS) depend on the number of patients. Data about prevalence of MS in Germany were insufficient and resulted from estimations and projections of small samples. Methods: Data from German statutory health insurance comprising 1,546,490 persons offer a representative sample. Criteria for MS are two diagnoses or one diagnosis plus one prescription of a disease modifying drug against MS. Results: Prevalence of MS in the sample is 0.30%. Recent analyses of other German claims data confirm these findings with prevalences between 0.25% and 0.29%, but this is twice as high as results of earlier studies. Patients are first diagnosed at the mean age of 37.1 +/- 10.6 years (mean +/- standard deviation) and die at a mean age of 68.0 +/- 14.3 years. Conclusions: Reasons for higher prevalence might be improved criteria for diagnosis and more consequent coding, but there is also some evidence for growing MS-prevalence worldwide.