Case fatality rates after admission to hospital with stroke: linked database study.

Population based mortality for stroke has declined in most Western countries during the past few decades. This is probably because of a decrease in both the incidence of and case fatality from stroke over this period. Routine statistics generally do not provide long term trends in case fatality, and few studies have looked at differences in case fatality rates between hospitals. We used routine hospital data, which had been linked to mortality data in the former Oxford health region of England, to study case fatality rates after admission for stroke and to compare rates between different periods and different hospitals.