Highlights of the 10th International Congress on Behçet's Disease.

Epidemiology The pap e rs on ep i d e m i o l ogy we re mainly based on hospital registries except for one field survey from Iraq that rep o rted a disease prevalence of 17/ 100,000 (1). There was a decrease in the number of patients in an opthalmology department in Japan (2) and in Iran (3) with a trend towards milder forms of the disease especially in Iran. A higher familial occurence was reported among the ethnic Turkish patients in the German Registry compared to the native Germans (18% vs 4.5%) (4). An abstract from Israel said that patients with a late (> 40 years) disease onset had similar clinical ch a ra c t e ri s t i c s when compared to those with younger onset (5).