Biliary atresia: Does ethnicity matter?

We wish to call the readership’s attention to the recent study by Boonstra et al. [1] on the systematic review that showed that the incidence and the prevalence of primary sclerosing cholangitis and primary biliary cirrhosis vary widely based on the geographical distribution. Further, it was previously observed that the severity and the incidence of primary sclerosing cholangitis were influenced by ethnicity [2,3]. We expanded here the scope of this methodology to another biliary disease, i.e. biliary atresia (BA), which is a destructive cholangiopathy of neonates that leads to biliary cirrhosis.