Prevalence of Autoimmune Diseases in the United States Save

An epidemiologic assessment of the prevalence of autoimmune diseases in the United States (US) finds that nearly 5% of the population has an autoimmune disorder, twice as many in women compared to men.

This prevalence study derived data from electronic health records from over 10 million patients from six large medical systems (California, Florida, Massachusetts, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri) looking for 105 autoimmune diseases. They applied their findings to the the U.S. population of 333.3 million. They identified the top 20 autoimmune diseases based on prevalence and according to sex and age.

They found over 15 million people, or 4.6% of the US population, have been diagnosed with at least one autoimmune disease between 2011 and 2022, with 34% of these diagnosed with two or more autoimmune diseases.  

Primary findings included:

• Females (63% of those with autoimmune disease) were almost twice as likely as males (37%) to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
• 65% of patients had one autoimmune disease.
• 24% of patients had two autoimmune diseases.
• 8% of patients had three autoimmune diseases.
• 2% of patients had four or more autoimmune diseases.

The top five diseases based on prevalence were rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, type I diabetes, Graves' disease and autoimmune thyroiditis.

This study is unique in that it provides a large-scale prevalence estimate of autoimmune disease in the US by sex and age.