Inflammatory Rheumatic Diseases in Germany: Numbers adjusted

1.8 million people affected

The number of people with inflammatory rheumatic diseases in Germany remains high at 2.6 percent, or 1.8 million people. The main improvement in the latest analysis by the German Rheumatology Research Center (DRFZ), a Leibniz Institute, however, is the better classification of the available data: Dr. Katinka Albrecht and Dr. Johanna Callhoff have compared German studies with European data and also evaluated the respective study methodologies.  For healthcare services, this means that the numbers provide a more reliable basis for needs assessment in rheumatology—a model that other European countries can also use.

The team was thereby able to refine existing estimates for 11 rheumatic diseases, with rheumatoid arthritis being the most common, affecting approximately 1% of the adult population. The new methodology also enables better comparability of the data. This is important because some German studies derive diagnoses solely from accounting data and may therefore overestimate the prevalence of individual diseases.
The study was published in July 2026 in EULAR Rheumatology Open.