Record Linkage in Studies of Cerebrovascular Disease in Oxford, England

Abstract

Data collected by record linkage are used as a basis for an analysis of the burden of cerebrovascular diseases in a population of 340,000 in central England. Comparison with studies which use other methods in the United States and England indicate that for all Cerebrovascular diseases together, and for subarachnoid hemorrhage, the assumptions underlying the analysis may have reflected the overall incidence of and survival from serious disease in Oxford reasonably accurately, but this may not be true for two individual rubrics, cerebral hemorrhage and infarction. Criticisms made of this conclusion in the recent literature are discussed. The system in its present state does not permit the study of transient ischemic attacks. Data shown here and elsewhere indicate that subarachnoid hemorrhage is the most reliable of the stroke diagnoses, and the Oxford data show reasonable consistency with others gathered elsewhere using other methods. It would appear that there are considerable age-specific and sex-specific differences for subarachnoid hemorrhage in terms of incidence and survival. Attention is drawn to the extent to which cerebrovascular disease occurs in people under age 65 years.