Prevalence and Incidence of Atopic Dermatitis: A Systematic Review

The primary objective of this study was to systematically review and analyse epidemiological studies of the prevalence and incidence of atopic dermatitis (AD) during childhood and adulthood, focusing on data from the 21st century. A systematic search of PubMed, EMBASE and Google (manual search) was performed in June 2019, followed by data abstraction and study quality assessment (Newcastle-Ottawa Scale). Cross-sectional and longitudinal epidemiological studies of individuals with AD (doctor-diagnosed or standardized definition) were included. Of 7,207 references reviewed, 378 moderate/good-quality studies were included: 352 on prevalence of AD and 26 on incidence of AD. In the 21st century, the 1-year prevalence of doctor-diagnosed AD ranged from 1.2% in Asia to 17.1% in Europe in adults, and 0.96% to 22.6% in children in Asia. The 1-year incidence ranged from 10.2 (95% confidence interval (95% CI) 9.9-10.6) in Italy to 95.6 (95% CI 93.4-97.9) per 1,000 person-years in children in Scotland. There were few recent studies on incidence of AD in the 21st century and no studies on adults only; most studies were conducted in Europe and the USA. Epidemiological studies on childhood and adulthood AD in different continents are still needed, especially on the incidence of AD during adulthood.