Circumcision prevalence

Circumcision prevalence in the percentage of males of all ages in the population who are circumcised. Circumcision incidence is the percentage of males (mostly newborn) who are currently being circumcised at any given time.

The United States of America

According to Wallerstein (1980), the incidence of male circumcision in the U.S. may have been around 10% in 1880, when it was just beginning to become legitimized as a medical procedure, and grew in popularity steadily until it's peak in the 1980's. Laumann et al. (1996) reported data from the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS), which was conducted in 1992. 1511 men aged 18 to 59 years old were studied. They were born between 1932 and 1974. Laumann reported finding that 77 percent of men born in the US were circumcised as compared with 42 percent of US-born men. Laumann et al. commented, "[t]he United States stands apart from the rest of the world for its high rates of neonatal circumcision.

According to the American Medical Association's most recent major document on medical circumcision, the "Report 10 of the Council on Scientific Affairs", created by their "Council on Science and Public Health" in 1999, the prevalence of circumcision in the United States increased from about 30% in the 1930s to nearly 80% by the early 1970s". Current reports estimate the rate of adult circumcised American men at approximately 80%.

H-CUP 2009 statistical brief

The following graphs represent data from a statistical brief released by the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (H-CUP).

2011 CDC report

According to a CDC report released in September 2011, male infant circumcision is on a downward trend. The rates of in-hospital infant circumcisions had increased from 48.3% during 1988--1991 to 61.1% during 1997--2000. They estimated infant circumcision rates during 1999--2010 using three independent data sources (the National Hospital Discharge Survey [NHDS] from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Nationwide Inpatient Sample [NIS] from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Charge Data Master [CDM] from SDIHealth).

The figure above shows the incidence of in-hospital newborn male circumcision, by data source, in the United States during 1999-2010. Incidence of newborn male circumcision decreased from 62.5% in 1999 to 56.9% in 2008 in the National Hospital Discharge Survey (average annual percentage change (AAPC) = -1.4%; p<0.001); from 63.5% in 1999 to 56.3% in 2008 in the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (AAPC = -1.2%; p<0.001); and from 58.4% in 2001 to 54.7% in 2010 in the Charge Data Master (AAPC = -0.75%; p<0.001).

Abbreviations: NHDS = National Hospital Discharge Survey; NIS = Nationwide Inpatient Sample; CDM = Charge Data Master.

Conflicting report

The picture of the slide used in the CDC presentation, seen here, was taken by an Intact America volunteer who attended the AIDS conference in Vienna.

One year earlier, at the AIDS 2010 Vienna conference, CDC spokesman Charbel El Bcheraoui delivered a presentation on circumcision complications, in which a study noting a steep drop in the neo-natal circumcision from 56% to 33% was presented. This is a sharp contrast from the 55% figure the CDC is currently releasing. The CDC disowns the 33% figure, asserting that it was based on calculations by SDI Health, a company in Plymouth Meeting, PA that analyzes health care data, and was not definitive. Andrew Kress, the chief executive of SDI Health, cautioned that the data had not yet been published and was still being analyzed.</ref> Both SDI and the CDC confirmed that the trend had been toward fewer circumcisions each year, adding that measuring the circumcision rate was not the purpose of the study, which was designed to measure the rate of complications from the procedure.

[EDITOR'S COMMENT: The long-term trend of the incidence of non-therapeutic male circumcision in the United States has been trending gradually downward since 1965. The United States government formerly provided annual statistics on the incidence of circumcision, however no statistics have been published since 2010, so no recent statistics are available. One would assume that the incidence of non-therapeutic male circumcision has continued its gradual decline.]

Global prevalence

Global circumcision rates, according to the WHO.

See also

• International prevalence of circumcision

External links

• Male Circumcision Prevalence by Country
• Circumcision Rates By State 2020
• Conte, Jonathon (2012). U.S. Hospital Circumcision Rates By State, Saving our Sons. Retrieved 25 August 2020.
• Bollinger, Dan (19 May 2017). Infant Male Genital Cutting Incidence Worldwide, www.academia.edu. Retrieved 28 August 2020.

Current information for the United States

Current prevalence

Peter Moore (2015) reported that 62 percent of all American males reported being circumcised, which increases the prevalence of intact foreskin to 38 percent of living American males of all ages. This percentage is expected to gradually but constantly decline, while the percentage of males who are intact due to the declining incidence of newborn boys receiving medically-unnecessary, non-therapeutic circumcision is expected to increase. The percentage of males with intact foreskin is lowest with senior citizens and highest in the youngest age groups due to the ever-declining incidence of circumcision.

Current incidence

Jacobsen et al. (2021) used data from 2003 through 2016 from the Kid's Inpatient Database of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to compare intact with circumcised boys in the first 28 days of life. The authors reported a gradual declining trend in the incidence of neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision throughout the study period. The overall incidence of circumcision decreased from 57.4 percent in 2003 to 52.1 percent in 2016 over the 13 year study period or 5.3 percentage points for an average decrease of 0.4 percentage point per year. The author noted "neonatal circumcision rates decreased significantly over time."

See also

• Intactness