Incidence and survival of Interstitial Lung Diseases in the UK in 2000-2022: real-world data from the OPCRD primary care database.

<bold>Objectives:</bold> To provide contemporary estimates of incidence trends, and survival of interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) potentially eligible to antifibrotic therapy, using primary care data from the Optimum Care Patient Research Database (OPCRD). <bold>Methods:</bold> We extracted incident cases of hypersensitivity pneumonitis, connective tissue disease related ILD, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) for the years 2000-2022. We analysed the IPF using three-degrees levels of coding. We calculated crude incidence rates for each year and for each disease category. We used Poisson to calculate incidence rate ratios, adjusting for age and sex. We estimated the survival time from diagnosis using Kaplan–Meier model. <bold>Results:</bold> We extracted data for 39,007 incident cases of ILD between 2000 and 2022 from the OPCRD database. Incidence rates varied across ILD categories and over time (Fig. 1A-B). We found overall incidence rates of 16.97, 7.61, 3.66 per 100,000 person-years for IPF, CTD-ILDs, and HP, respectively. Median survival was 5.00 years in IPF, 7.10 years in CTD-ILDs and 9.11 years in HP, with the broadest IPF category having the worst survival. <bold>Conclusion:</bold> Our population-based study emphasizes the considerable burden of ILDs, with more than 20,000 new cases of ILDs diagnosed each year in the UK.