Profile of Childhood Vitiligo in China: An Analysis of 541 Patients

Abstract

From July to December 2002, we collected data from 2247 vitiligo patients in order to establish the clinical and epidemiologic profile of vitiligo in China. Of these patients, 541 (24.1%) were children aged equal to or less than 12 years. Of the 541 children, 274 (50.6%) were boys and 267 (49.4%) were girls, with a mean age of 8.87 years and a mean onset age of 7.28 years. Similar to adult patients, boys and girls were affected by vitiligo with equal frequency. The most frequent age of onset was between 4 and 8 years (42.5%). The mean duration of vitiligo was 19.71 months (range: 0-132 months). The most common type of vitiligo was vitiligo vulgaris, the frequency of which was 38.1%, followed by focal vitiligo (34.6%), segmental vitiligo (19.4%), acrofacial vitiligo (7.6%), and universal vitiligo (0.4%). Segmental vitiligo had an earlier the other types. Of the 541 children with vitiligo, 60 (11.1%) had a family history, and 3 (0.6%) had more than one family member who was affected. Forty-one (7.6%) children had an associated autoimmune disease: halo nevi and alopecia areata, which were observed in 39 (7.2%) and 2 (0.4%) children, respectively.

Childhood vitiligo: Clinical epidemiological profile

“…Our review show a preponderance of girls in children with vitiligo, similar to the observation made in majority of previously reported studies [6][7][8][9]10]. Although, two studies from Korea and China noted an almost equal incidence in boys and girls [2,11,12].…”

The Psychosocial Aspects of Vitiligo: A Focus on Stress Involvement in Children with Vitiligo

“…Studies that reported vitiligo is more common in females: India (Handa &Dogra, 2003, Jaisankar et al, 1992, Kuwait (Nanda et al, 1999), Croatia (Prcic et al, 2006), China (Lin et al, 2011), differed from our data. The mean age (11 years old) of our cohort was higher than other reports (between 6.2 years to 9 years) (Handa & Dogra, 2003, Hu et al, 2006, Nanda et al, 1999, Prcic et al, 2006. A family history of vitiligo (about 20%) was comparable to those of Akrem's (18%) (Akrem et al, 2008), but higher than of Lin's (Lin et al, 2011) (13.5%).…”

Epidemiological study, clinical spectrum and associations of childhood vitiligo in a tertiary care centre

“…However boys and girls were affected equally in Zhi Hu et al study. 17 In our study, the commonest age of onset of the disease was between 4 to 9 years constituting 77.5% of the cases. Belliappa et al reported that 68.9% of cases had onset of disease between 4 and 8 years of age similar to our study.…”