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66 Epidemiology of neurological conditions in a large urban conurbation

jnnp · 2025-11-26 · canonical JSON source

7 visible annotations · policy: published · automated confidence ≥ 75.00%

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Background Manchester Centre for Clinical Neurosciences is the sole provider of neurological services for 3.3 million people in the Greater Manchester region, with all outpatient clinic letters available on a single electronic system. We used text mining and natural language processing techniques to extract neurological diagnoses from clinic letters.Methods All patients attending a general or specialist neurology clinic in 13 hospitals in Greater Manchester between January 2018 and November 2023 were included. Free-text diagnoses were processed through MedCAT, mapped to SNOMED-CT, categorised into 13 headline groups and linked to demographics.Results A total of 125,273 patients were included in the final dataset, from whom 175,293 diagnoses were mapped. Headaches (n=26631, 15.19%), epilepsy/seizure (n=24880, 14.19%), movement disorders (n= 17468, 9.97%), neuromuscular disorders (n=16454, 9.39%) and functional disorders (n=16074, 9.17%) were the most frequent diagnoses. Compared to the census data, patients were overrepresented in the most deprived postcodes (IMD quintile 1, 37%) and underrepresented in the least deprived postcodes (IMD quintile 5, 13%). Headache, epilepsy and functional disorders were overrepresented in IMD quintile 1.Conclusion We have generated a dataset of neurological diagnoses, the largest to our knowledge, to aid epidemiological study into each disease category and understanding of health inequalities.Rajiv.Mohanraj@nca.nhs.uk