numbers going up?

[Elena]

When I got diagnosed in April 2009 I learned that there are about 1-2 new WG cases per 1 million children each year. Which is extremely few. However just this autumn there's been 4 or 5 new cases, and that's just in the southern half of Norway. Norway's only got about 4.8 million inhabitants, which means it's been quite an explotion of wegs in under 18s lately.. I wonder if it's a trend we're seeing or if it's just a coincidence. Any thoughts?

At least this means I've finally met someone my own age with wegs. Just had a chat with a 17 years old girl who just got diagnosed. Feels strange suddenly being the experienced one

[JanW]

I believe that we will find that any 'explosion' of WG cases is going to be due to underreporting of the disease in the past, and all of the cases where people got sick and died before they were diagnosed. The stories on these forums are tales of misdiagnosis and misadventure -- just, thank goodness, none of us were sick enough to die before our cases were actually discovered and treated. Big difference I bet vs. even 10 years ago, and big difference vs. something like cancer, which is more common and easily diagnosed.

[Elena]

There's a nurse here, on the children's ward for rheumatic diseases, who's only been here for half a year and she feels like wegs is almost a common disease. Because there's been so many cases this year. Kind of weird..

But yeah, I suppose you are right about the underreporting in the past. I feel so grateful sometimes that I wasn't born 20 years, even 10 years, earlier. 3-4 months of being sick before diagnosis was bad enough!

[pberggren1]

My mom's boss had a client come in today that has Wegs. So wierd. I now know of 2 other Weggies in close proximity.

[Sangye]

The increased number of Weggies could be due to improved diagnosis and/or to an actual increase in the prevalence. One of the hypotheses about its origin is toxins and our toxic exposure worldwide is increasingly dramatically. In general autoimmune diseases are on the rise--even some which are much easier to diagnose than Wegs.

[ScreaminMeanie]

If I hadn't lived in a large town with a University research/teaching hospital when I was dx'ed the first time, I probably would have had years of misery and not be around today. I don't know if there are more cases occurring now, or just more cases being diagnosed because information sharing amongst the medical community is so much advanced now than it was 20 years ago.

[Sangye]

I think some of the increase might be due to patients demanding answers and doing their own research online. We've had several members say that they figured out they had Wegs before their doctors did!