Abstract
Whipple's disease (WD) is a rare systemic infection due, in genetically susceptible individuals, to Tropheryma whipplei, a heterogeneous Gram-positive actinobacteria. Although it has already been recognised that WD affects mainly middle-aged Caucasian men, the prevalence of WD is virtually unknown. The annual incidence of WD in the general population is said to be less than 1 per 1,000,000, but scientific evidence for these figures is still lacking. On the basis of the number of patients recorded with a diagnosis of Whipple’s disease in the regional registers for rare diseases of Lombardia, Liguria and Piemonte-Valle d'Aosta regions, we studied the prevalence of WD in the north-western part of Italy. Forty-six patients with Whipple’s disease were recorded in these regions (13 females; mean age at diagnosis 52.1 ± 11.1 years). Since 16,130,725 inhabitants live in these four regions, prevalence of WD in the general population is 3/106 and almost 30 % of the patients are females. WD is certainly a rare disease but it also affects women in a considerable proportion of cases.
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Acknowledgments
We are in debt to Simone Baldovino, Erica Daina, and Mirella Rossi for providing anonymized data. We are also grateful to Susan West for reading and correcting the manuscript.
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The study received no funding.
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None to declare.
Ethical Statement
All patients had signed the informed consent as required by the Institutional Ethical Board that approved the study; population data were taken from the public dominion (www.tuttitalia.it/regioni/popolazioni).
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Biagi, F., Balduzzi, D., Delvino, P. et al. Prevalence of Whipple's disease in north-western Italy. Eur J Clin Microbiol Infect Dis 34, 1347–1348 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-015-2357-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-015-2357-2