Evidence-based lumbar spine surgery. The role of national registration.

Lumbar spine surgery has for a long time been mainly authority based but during the last decade, much interest has focused on outcome evaluation, exempliŽ ed by a very high number of outcome instruments developed (Zanoli et al. 2000) and this development re ects a paradigm shift within spinal surgery. For lumbar spine surgery to develop and to be based on clinical experience, pilot studies, prospective randomised studies and broad, preferably national, registrations are required. This will be re ected in the following presentation which, however, mainly focuses on problems and beneŽ ts with the Swedish National Lumbar Spine Register.