PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Roberto Carbone
AU  - Rosangela Filiberti
AU  - Edoardo Savarino
AU  - Riccardo Ghio
AU  - Alberto Ballestrero
TI  - Interstitial lung diseases in Europe
DP  - 2011 Sep 01
TA  - European Respiratory Journal
PG  - p3752
VI  - 38
IP  - Suppl 55
4099  - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/38/Suppl_55/p3752.short
4100  - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/38/Suppl_55/p3752.full
SO  - Eur Respir J2011 Sep 01; 38
AB  - Background: Interstitial lung diseases (ILD) comprise a disomogeneous group of more than 200 pulmonary disorders and are progressive life-threatening diseases. Etiology is unknown in a variety of ILD. ILD are considered rare diseases, nevertheless they constitute 15-20% of all respiratory pathologies as compared to 6-25% of COPD and to 0.8-0.9% of respiratory tumours. Knowledge of epidemiology of ILD would be important to the planning of services for these patients, but so far ILD have not been well characterized.Aim: To quantify the burden of the ILD in Europe.Methods: English articles on ILD epidemiology in Europe were reviewed using PubMed as the search engine.Results and conclusions: In Europe, ILD incidence rates ranged from 3.62 (South of Spain) to 7.6 cases ×100,000 inhabitants (Spain) according to different studies. In the majority of cases a male predominance was found. Among ILD, the most frequent entities were idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF: 19-39% of all ILD), sarcoidosis (12-35%) and hypersensitivity pneumonia (3-12%). Incidence rates of IPF and sarcoidosis ranged from 0.93 (Greece) to 6.78 cases ×100,000 (UK) and from 1.07 (Greece) to 5.59 ×100,000 (UK), respectively. Median age at diagnosis was about 61 years for IPF and 42 years for sarcoidosis. Fibrotic NSIP was considered as a new subgroup, making up 20-35% of patients previously diagnosed as IPF. Few data exist on the frequency of ILD and discrepancies among different areas have been observed. Differences in part real, but are due to the use of disomogeneous sources (disease registries, selected clinical series, different study designs), to the inclusion of incident or prevalent cases, to variable criteria for diagnosis, or to selection bias.