Cong-Xin Dai1, Ren-Zhi Wang1, Ming Feng1. 1. Department of Neurosurgery, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing 100730, China.
To the Editor: China is the most populous country and has the largest number of clinical cases of pituitary diseases in the world. However, in the past few years, the work of clinical data collection and analysis was very weak, which lagged very far behind the developed country. To further obtain the complete information about Chinese patients with pituitary disease, the China Pituitary Disease Register Network (CPDRN) was established by Peking Union Medical Hospital in 2015. The CPDRN not only provides a perfect database for clinical data collection and information sharing but also raises people's attention to the collection of clinical information.After the establishment of CPDRN, most pituitary disease institutions in China would like to register the information of patients with pituitary disease into CPDRN and share the registered clinical data. To date, more than 12,000 cases of pituitary tumors from 34 most famous hospitals in China have been registered. In this database, there are more than 1600 cases of Cushing disease. To our knowledge, this is the largest database about Cushing disease all over the world. Based on this database, several clinical trials have been carried out and some papers published.[12] Big data on Chinese pituitary disease have been obtained, which filled the defects of the pituitary disease epidemiology in the world, because China is one of the most important parts of the world. These precious data have provided solid evidence for the writing of expert consensus and guidelines about the management of pituitary disease.[3] We are going to carry out several nationwide multicenter clinical trials and epidemiological investigations.In summary, CPDRN is the first multicenter database for pituitary diseases registry in China, and it provides the most widely used platform for collection and sharing of data about patients with pituitary disease in China. The big data from this platform are very important for multicenter clinical studies, epidemiological investigation, and expert consensus and guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of pituitary disease.
Financial support and sponsorship
This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81502639) and Special Fund in the Capital of China (Z161100000516092).