North West Thames registry of neurological disease.

A feasibility study has been carried out to determine whether a population-based registry of neurological disease can be established using the Hospital (Inpatient) Activity Analysis (HAA) records for England and Wales. The study provides a valuable opportunity to use and test the HAA system. The neurological disease chosen was the Guillain-Barré-Strohl syndrome (GBS), because it would be expected that most patients would be admitted to hospital, and recurrent attacks or chronicity are rare. In this study it has been demonstrated that, for GBS, a neurological registry, based on HAA records, provided an excellent source of data to measure the incidence of the disease and potentially any change of incidence over time. The proportion of coding errors was found to be under 5%.