What is a rare disease?
In the United States, a rare disease is defined as a condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people. This definition was created by Congress in the Orphan Drug Act of 1983. Rare diseases became known as orphan diseases because drug companies were not interested in adopting them to develop treatments. The Orphan Drug Act created financial incentives to encourage companies to develop new drugs for rare diseases. The rare disease definition was needed to establish which conditions would qualify for the new incentive programs.
Other countries have their own official definitions of a rare disease. In the European Union, a disease is defined as rare when it affects fewer than 1 in 2,000 people.
How many rare diseases are there?
There may be as many as 7,000 rare diseases. The total number of Americans living with a rare disease is estimated at between 25-30 million. This estimate has been used by the rare disease community for several decades to highlight that while individual diseases may be rare, the total number of people with a rare disease is large.
In the United States, only a few types of rare diseases are tracked when a person is diagnosed. These include certain infectious diseases, birth defects, and cancers. It also includes the diseases on state newborn screening tests. Because most rare diseases are not tracked, it is hard to determine the exact number of rare diseases or how many people are affected.
If you are looking for statistics on a specific disease, check to see if the disease is listed in Genetics Home Reference, GeneReviews, or Medscape Reference. These resources usually include statistical information. To find medical journal articles with statistics, you can conduct a PubMed search using the disease name and the word “prevalence” or “incidence.”
What causes rare diseases?
There are many different causes of rare diseases. The majority are thought to be genetic, directly caused by changes in genes or chromosomes. In some cases, genetic changes that cause disease are passed from one generation to the next. In other cases, they occur randomly in a person who is the first in a family to be diagnosed.
Many rare diseases, including infections, some rare cancers, and some autoimmune diseases, are not inherited. While researchers are learning more each year, the exact cause of many rare diseases is still unknown.
