Hong Kong ranks third for new cases of bowel disease, behind South Korea and Guangzhou, say CUHK researchers
The city has seen around 26 new cases of inflammatory bowel disease for every 1 million people in recent years, with some 5,000 cases diagnosed to date
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in Hong Kong and the rest of Asia has grown at an “alarming rate” and this is likely to escalate in the next 10 years, said researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
In top medical journal The Lancet, published on Monday, researchers pointed to how there were 30 new cases diagnosed for every 1 million people in Hong Kong in 2014, compared to one out of every 1 million in 1981. They estimated that 5,000 people in Hong Kong have been diagnosed with IBD to date.
In their paper, researchers also compared the incidence rate of the disease in Hong Kong with that of other Asian locations over the last 17 years. To do this, they scanned more than 11,000 studies on the disease published globally between 1990 to 2016, and did an in-depth analysis of 147 studies.
They found that the city ranked third out of eight Asian locations in terms of the incidence rate of the disease. On average, Hong Kong had 26 new cases for every 1 million people, behind South Korea with 78 new cases, and Guangzhou in mainland China with 33 cases.
In Western countries, the incidence rate is a lot higher, but most studies show that this has stabilised.