Epidemiology
Men are affected three times as often as women. There is also a striking geographic variation in the prevalence of IgA nephropathy throughout the world. It is the most common glomerular disease in the Far East and Southeast Asia, comprising almost half of all the patients with glomerular disease. However, it comprises only about 25% of the proportion in European and about 10% among North Americans, with African–Americans having a very low prevalence of about 2%. A confounding factor in this analysis is the existing policy of screening and use of kidney biopsy as an investigative tool. School children in Japan undergo routine urinalysis (as do Army recruits in Singapore) and any suspicious abnormality is pursued with a kidney biopsy, which might partly explain the high incidence of IgA nephropathy in those countries.
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