Huntington's disease.

摘要

Michael Rawlins (Oct 23, p 1372) comments that the prevalence of Huntington's disease is rising. We would like to suggest several additional explanations for this finding. First, the baby-boomers are now in their 50s-60s. Typically Huntington's disease begins in the 30s-40s, but given the duration of illness, peak prevalence actually occurs in the 50s-60s. We explored the effect of this large baby-boomer birth cohort on Huntington's disease prevalence, using age-specific data from our 1996 study. Prevalence of Huntington's disease in New South Wales, Australia, would have increased from 6.3 per 100 000 in 1996 to 6.8 per 100 000 in 2009 on the basis of changes in population structure alone.