Current estimates for the UK suggest that PBC has a prevalence of c35/100,000 with the implication that there are about 20,000 patients in the UK.
PBC is diagnosed more frequently than in the past. Whether this is as a result of increased awareness amongst patients and doctors and better availability and increased use of diagnostic tests, or a result of a true increase in disease frequency (or a combination of both) isn’t clear.
There is now good evidence to suggest that there are PBC clusters, with disease frequency being up to 5-fold higher in some areas (when corrected for population size).
