Compiling a practice disease register--the prevalence of incidental problems.

This paper presents the results of a five-year survey in a general practice of the annual incidence and prevalence rates of selected major chronic medical problems presented to, and recognized by, the family doctors. These rates are compared with figures from the second national morbidity survey, 1970-71. The difficulties of defining some of these diseases accurately and of avoiding systematic errors in morbidity recordings are also discussed.