In Germany about 1.5 million people with rheumatic diseases live at present. The numbers of those, which suffer from rheumatism, will constantly rise, that show relatively current numbers of the commercial health insurance company KKH, which evaluated its insured person data in this regard. According to these figures, the number of people suffering from rheumatism in Germany rose by an average of more than 36 percent between 2009 and 2019. However, the rate of increase depends on the federal states. While in Baden-Württemberg and Saxony growth rates of 59 and 54 percent respectively were recorded, Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia were far below average at 24 and 28 percent respectively. The German Rheumatism League as a professional association has also determined that women are three times more frequently affected by inflammatory rheumatic diseases than men, who also fall ill on average ten years later. Women usually fall ill after the age of 50. The risk to fall ill with rheumatism is however particularly high starting from the 70th year of life. Experts of the German society for rheumatology (DGRh) deplore above all the lack of rheumatism specialists and thus also the late diagnosis of new diseases, which in the case of rheumatoid arthritis with 60,000 to 70,000 newly ill humans per year, on average nine months too late is discovered. In order to do justice to all in the supply – because ever more humans fall ill in the future with rheumatic complaints – it would need 1,350 physicians of the internalistic rheumatology in Germany. But only 750 are available. Experts of the DGRh warn of an increasing problem due to not sufficiently existing training further places, which would be recompensed then also only over case lump sums in the patient supply, so Hanns Martin Lorenz as an executive committee of the society. These case lump sums cause that some hospitals with less financially strong departments would be assigned also fewer training further places, explains the expert. Since the specialized departments of the rheumatology are predominantly ambulatory active, they are turnover-weaker and thus systemically rather from an undersupply concerned, which could lead to the endangerment of the medical supply of this range.
Source: Ärzteblatt