Medical registers.

Registers are records in which information is precisely noted. Their form owes much to William Farr, who headed the General Register Office in Britain beginning in 1839. Medical registers may be designed for various purposes: preventive medical purposes; specific diseases; treatment, aftercare, and at-risk listings; skills and resources indices; prospective studies; and specific information purposes. Entries are correctly diagnosed consistently updated, and derived from multiple overlapping sources in well-defined populations. In Israel, a national neurologic disease registry was established in 1969 based on the diagnoses of discharge of all hospitalized patients. This registry has yielded valuable epidemiologic information on a large number of neurologic disorders.