NATIONAL STROKE REGISTRIES: WHAT CAN WE

Stroke is a major cause of long-term adult disability, death, and health care costs worldwide. This over-whelming burden on global health necessitates ongo-ing improvements in stroke management. Considerable progress in stroke care is now evident as a result of better prevention measures and the increasing use of acute stroke units, urgent triage, multimodal CT- or MRI-based brain imaging, and IV and endovascular reperfusion therapy. Randomized controlled trials (RCT) have been rightly put on top of hierarchies of evidence for assess-ing the efficacy of therapeutic interventions. RCT, however, also have some inherent shortcomings that leave a clear need for complementary registry research. While efficacy is best evaluated in RCT, registries ar