Neurological signs and late-life depressive symptoms in a community population: the ESPRIT study.

Objective: Depression in the elderly is common and often resistant to treatment. It has been suggested that late-life depression may be related to underlying neurobiological changes. However, these observations are derived from diverse clinical samples and as yet have not been confirmed in a more representative population study.

The psychiatric case register: noble past, challenging present, but exciting future.

Case registers have been fundamental to mental health research from the early asylum studies onwards. Having declined in popularity over the past 20 years, they are likely to see a resurgence of interest with the advent of electronic clinical records and the technological capacity to derive anonymised databases from these.

The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust Biomedical Research Centre (SLAM BRC) case register: development and descriptive data.

Background: Case registers have been used extensively in mental health research. Recent developments in electronic medical records, and in computer software to search and analyse these in anonymised format, have the potential to revolutionise this research tool.

Methods: We describe the development of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLAM) Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Case Register Interactive Search tool (CRIS) which allows research-accessible datasets to be derived from SLAM, the largest provider of secondary mental healthcare in Europe.