Projection of the number of multiple sclerosis patients in Germany

For determining the prevalence of multiple sclerosis (MS) in Germany, the o utcomes of several epidemiological studies a re available. If these rates a re transferred to Germany as a whole, figures result of 67,000 to 138,000 M S patients in all. The differing prevalence rates may be caused by various problems in finding patients, the epidemiological area,and different popula tion structures. To avoid these difficulties, a new approach for calculatin g the number of patients with diagnosed MS was chosen based on representati ve samples taken from the groups of physicians involved in MS treatment. Th e disadvantage of this approach is that it does not allow any questioning o f the diagnosis. Projecting the results in this way and their subsequent co mpilation - taking "double treatments" into consideration showed a total of 122,000 patients with diagnosed multiple sclerosis in Germany. This figure corresponds to a prevalence rate of 149.1 per 100,000 inhabitants and is w ithin the range found by Poser et al. [19]: 127 per 100,000 excluding the d iagnostic category "possible multiple sclerosis" and 170 per 100,000 includ ing it.