In a retrospective study we analysed the survival times of all breast cancer patients treated with mistletoe extract in the Oncology Outpatient Department of the Herdecke Communal Hospital during the period from 1981 to 2000. The survival data for our patients were compared with those for other similar patient populations (tumour registries). The comparatively favourable results from the presen...

BACKGROUND The Relaxin for the Treatment of Acute Heart Failure (RELAX-AHF) trial enrolled 1161 patients admitted to the hospital for acute heart failure (AHF) to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of serelaxin, a recombinant form of human relaxin-2. We characterized how representative RELAX-AHF clinical trial enrollees were to those patients with AHF found in international registries. METHODS...

BACKGROUND Hospitals and death registries in Australia are operated under individual state government jurisdictions. Some state borders are located in heavily populated areas or are located near to major capital cities. Mortality indicators for hospital located near state borders may not be estimated accurately if patients are lost as they cross state borders. The aim of this study was to evalu...

Materials and methods Data from the literature were revised, focusing our attention on published reviews on surgical and endoscopic palliation for oesophagus, colon-rectum and pancreatic-biliary cancers. We also obtained the data from the registries of our hospital on these very diagnoses. Finally, we requested the number of metallic stents sold in Italy and in Europe to one of the main manufac...

Metadata Registries (MDR) are information systems defined to manage and publish metadata related to information and data models. An inherent part of the data models registered within an MDR is the vocabularies used to assign values to data elements. These vocabularies relate to concepts that can be managed by Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS). This paper discusses how an MDR can import and t...

BACKGROUND The Danish National Patient Registry (DNPR) is one of the world's oldest nationwide hospital registries and is used extensively for research. Many studies have validated algorithms for identifying health events in the DNPR, but the reports are fragmented and no overview exists. OBJECTIVES To review the content, data quality, and research potential of the DNPR. METHODS We examined...

BACKGROUND The validity of the registration of patients in stroke-specific registries has seldom been investigated, nor compared with administrative hospital discharge registries. The objective of this study was to examine the validity of the registration of patients in a stroke-specific registry (The Danish Stroke Registry [DSR]) and a hospital discharge registry (The Danish National Patient R...

Follow-up procedures vary among cancer registries in North America. US registries are funded by the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program and/or the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR). SEER registries ascertain vital status and date of last contact to meet follow-up standards. NPCR and Canadian registries primarily conduct linkages with local and national death re...