The Impact of Disease Registries on Advancing Knowledge and Understanding of Dementia Globally

Abstract

To help address the increasing challenges related to the provision of dementia care, dementia registries have emerged around the world as important tools to gain insights and a better understanding of the disease process. Dementia registries provide a valuable source of standardized data collected from a large number of patients. This review explores the published research relating to different dementia registries around the world and discusses how these registries have improved our knowledge and understanding of the incidence, prevalence, risk factors, mortality, diagnosis, and management of dementia. A number of the best-known dementia registries with high research output including SveDem, NACC, ReDeGi, CREDOS and PRODEM were selected to study the publication output based on their data, investigate the key findings of these registry-based studies. Registries data contributed to understanding many aspects of the disease including disease prevalence in specific areas, patient characteristics and how they differ in populations, mortality risks, as well as the disease risk factors. Registries data impacted the quality of patients’ lives through determining the best treatment strategy for a patient based on previous patient outcomes. In conclusion, registries have significantly advanced scientific knowledge and understanding of dementia and impacted policy, clinical practice care delivery.