Epidemiology of autoimmune diseases in Denmark.

An epidemiologic study of the autoimmune diseases taken together has not been done heretofore. The National Patient Register of Denmark is used to estimate the population prevalence of 31 possible or probable autoimmune diseases. Record linkage is used to estimate 465 pairwise co-morbidities in individuals among the 31 diseases, and familial aggregation among sibs, parents and offspring. The prevalence of any of the 31 diseases in the population is more than 5%. Within individuals, there is extensive comorbidity across the 31 diseases. Within families, aggregation is strongest for individual diseases and weak across diseases. These data confirm the importance of the autoimmune diseases as a group and suggest that common etiopathologies exist among them.