1982 Volume 9 Issue 12 Pages 17-26
We conformed the age and sex-specific onset rates of SLE in three series from the United States, Netherland and Japan to the Weibull distribution. It was shown that all sample distributions were conformed to the distribution except for the first decade of age. In addition, it was observed on the Weibull probability paper that all distributions except the one for the American male SLE were displayed parallelly with nearly the same slope. It was not reasonable to explain the etiology of the disease with the random failure model simply because of a good fit obtained by the Weibull distribution. It was considered however that the fact that there were remarkable similarity on the shape among distributions from the three countries suggested the empirical distribution derived in this paper to be be used as provisional reference until more accurate statistics would be available.
