Atopic Dermatitis Burden in Older Adults May Surge by 2050: Daily Dose

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Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.

On April 21, 2025, we reported on a study published in Frontiers in Public Health that aimed to examine the global burden of adult atopic dermatitis (AD) among older adults from 1990 to 2021 and to project its change to 2050.

The study

Researchers determined the estimates and 95% uncertainty levels of prevalence, incidence, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) among people aged 60 years and older who participated in the Global Burden of Diseases Study 2021.

The findings

Investigators reported a global prevalence of AD in older adults of more than 11 million in 2021, representing a dramatic increase of 107% since 1990. Incidence of AD in the older population reached 1.4 million in 2021, a surge of 110% compared to 1990. Despite this substantial increase in case numbers, age-standardized prevalence rates (ASPRs) in AD declined from 1117 to 1017 cases per 100,000 population between 1990 and 2021, according to the results.

Researchers also reported that the geographic and socioeconomic distribution of AD burden showed pronounced patterns. They found that the consistently highest incidence, prevalence, and DALYs were associated with regions with high sociodemographic index levels. The 5 regions with the highest incidence of AD among older adults were high-income North America, high-income Asia Pacific, Western Europe, Southern Latin America, and Tropical Latin America. “Among these, high-income North America reported the peak.” Findings from the study's predictive analysis project that by 2050, the global numbers of incidence, prevalence, and DALYs for older adult AD will continue to increase.

Authors' comments

"Although the age-standardized rates of DALYs were predicted to slightly decrease annually from 2022 to 2050, the absolute numbers of incidence, prevalence and DALYs were predicted to keep increasing, suggesting a huge challenge in the control and management of older adult AD remained in the next decades."

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