Plana-Ripoll Oleguer, Liu Xiaoqin, Köhler-Forsberg Ole, Sørensen Henrik Toft, Momen Natalie C
Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Center for Population Medicine, Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark.
National Centre for Register-based Research, Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Clin Epidemiol. 2025 Apr 16;17:387-407. doi: 10.2147/CLEP.S509147. eCollection 2025.
The Danish national hospital registers are a rich source of data for psychiatric epidemiology. The potential to identify diagnosed mental disorders in the Danish population has resulted in a plethora of important research studies. However, no recent review of these research sources exists.
To review the content, data quality and epidemiological considerations regarding mental disorders in the Danish hospital registers.
We provide information on the setting, history, and data access regarding mental disorders in the Danish hospital registers (defined according to the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, F group Mental and behavioural disorder codes). We describe the registration of mental disorders over time in the Danish hospital registers, by providing counts of individuals diagnosed with mental disorders each year, by types of mental disorders, diagnosis, hospital contact, and contact unit. We also provide information on considerations when using these data sources, including data quality. For this, we searched PubMed to identify validation studies of coding of mental disorder diagnoses.
Between 1969 and 2022, 1,136,280 individuals (10.7% of all individuals who resided in Denmark in this period) have been registered as having a mental disorder as a primary or secondary diagnosis in a psychiatric unit in Denmark at least once. The type of contact and unit diagnoses were made in varied by mental disorder type. The literature indicates that a large proportion of coded diagnoses in the Danish hospital registers of mental disorders were considered valid.
We provide an overview of the available data for investigating mental disorders in the Danish hospital registers. We raise awareness of the limitations researchers should be aware of when using this data and discuss their implications. Careful consideration should be given to these during study design and when reporting findings from register-based studies on diagnosed mental disorders.
丹麦国家医院登记册是精神疾病流行病学丰富的数据来源。利用这些登记册识别丹麦人口中已确诊精神障碍的潜力催生了大量重要的研究。然而，最近尚无对这些研究来源的综述。
综述丹麦医院登记册中有关精神障碍的内容、数据质量及流行病学考量。
我们提供了关于丹麦医院登记册中精神障碍的设置、历史及数据获取情况的信息（根据《国际疾病分类》第十版F类精神和行为障碍编码定义）。通过按精神障碍类型、诊断、医院接触情况及接触科室提供每年被诊断患有精神障碍的个体数量，我们描述了丹麦医院登记册中精神障碍随时间的登记情况。我们还提供了使用这些数据源时的考量信息，包括数据质量。为此，我们检索了PubMed以识别精神障碍诊断编码的验证研究。
1969年至2022年期间，共有1,136,280人（占该时期丹麦所有居民的10.7%）至少有一次在丹麦精神科病房被登记为患有精神障碍，作为主要或次要诊断。接触类型和诊断科室因精神障碍类型而异。文献表明，丹麦医院登记册中很大一部分编码诊断被认为是有效的。
我们概述了丹麦医院登记册中可用于调查精神障碍的现有数据。我们提高了研究人员在使用这些数据时应意识到的局限性的认识，并讨论了其影响。在研究设计以及报告基于登记册的已确诊精神障碍研究结果时，应仔细考虑这些因素。
