Register-based research

Denmark offers extensive capture of a number of key health parameters through registers. These registers allow detailed tracking of patients for e.g. causes of death, occurrence of somatic and psychiatric diseases, use of drugs, drug side effects, use of other health services (general practice, specialists, physiotherapy etc.), and health expenses.

This may be used both for establishing cohorts of patients and for studying causes of disease. However, it may also be used for long-term studies of outcomes in participants in e.g. randomised controlled studies and follow-up of patients from previously established cohorts.

The registers allow research in as well children as adults and increasing life-long follow-up of individual subjects. This allows follow-up beyond the limited time span often seen in clinical trials as well as cost effective and easy access to data, which may otherwise be difficult to obtain. Biochemical data may also be obtained from departments of clinical biochemistry as well as data from image diagnostics. The registers may be cross-linked and linked to external data allowing detailed analysis of complex information.

Key expertise in obtaining, extracting, correlating, and analysing data is available.