If I had been born ~90 years earlier I would have died before I formed my first memory. That thought comforts me when I feel like life is unfair or difficult. The whole thing is a bonus for me… I should be dead. Maybe similar feelings provide some comfort for people who have to manage their lives with diseases like Crohns.
OK, but note that Crohn's (and ulcerative colitis) are nearly unknown in the developing world. For reasons we don't understand, they are caused by modernity. So 90 years ago having Crohn's would be much less likely. (Symptoms from both Crohn's and ulcerative colitis don't usually present until the teens or early twenties, so this is not a case of infants with the disease simply dying early in the developing world.)
Mild cases of Crohn’s are less likely to be diagnosed in the developing world and far more likely to be deadly when combined with something else like Malaria or TB. So it’s almost impossible to compare statistics between such wildly different countries.
Essentially unless the healthcare system is good enough and population healthy enough you only capture severe casss.
I don’t think that’s the expert consensus at all, unless you’re using a much more expansive definition of CD and UC (vague “IBS-like symptoms”). People have studied this question very carefully, and the strong consensus is that these diseases, which are very often deadly if left untreated (and sometimes even if treated), occur at vastly lower rates in the developing world. It’s not mere measurement error.
I’ve heard both views from experts. If you look at the methodology used to collect data, and consider how different health system would what was available for review, it’s easy to question the validity of these studies.
“To model IBD mortality, we used the causes of death database, which includes data from vital registration and verbal autopsy data.”
“To estimate the non-fatal burden of IBD, we used two separate databases, one for Crohn's disease and another for ulcerative colitis. Both included data from literature, hospital discharges, and claims data (the latter available only from the USA in 2000, 2010, and 2012; further information on IBD data is provided in the appendix, p 21). ”
Do you have links to papers that argue for your position, or are you just saying you personally talked to a researcher who held it? The paper you link reports a 60 fold difference in prevalence of a deadly illness, which is not the sort of thing that can be easily obscured by the measurement issues you bring up.
Researcher, I don’t know if they published anything on the topic.
As to the 60 fold difference, I’m not sure if you realize just how vast the difference in healthcare systems are worldwide. Chad for example has 1/60th the doctors per person as the US, how many colonoscopies do you expect they preform per year?
