Neurological Conditions: estimated prevalence in Scotland in 2026

1. Background

The Scottish Government’s Neurological Care and Support: Framework for Action (2020-2025) (Scottish Government, 2019) noted that neurological conditions accounted for between 10% and 20% of acute medical admissions, and 10% of the overall Burden of Disease in Scotland, as measured by Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), a composite measure of ill-health and early death. The Framework discussed the challenge in obtaining basic epidemiological data about neurological conditions. It highlighted the need for more accurate population-level prevalence estimates to inform service planning and development. It set out the following data commitment to address these issues.

Neurological Framework: Commitment 12 

“We will work with NHS Information Services Division (now part of Public Health Scotland (PHS)) and others to ensure a cohesive approach to capturing the needs of people with a neurological condition that will: 

• improve the recording of neurological conditions in people’s routine health and care records, so that they are visible to appropriate services; 
• enable more accurate population-level estimates of the prevalence of neurological conditions to inform other data analysis;  
• support the development of systems and processes for service planning and workforce development, based on these improved prevalence estimates.” 

In order to address this data commitment, in 2022 the Scottish Government (SG) worked with PHS to publish an Experimental Statistics publication covering the estimated prevalence in Scotland of selected neurological conditions (SG, 2022). It reported, for the first time, data covering general practice recorded diagnoses of specified neurological conditions, provided by the former Scottish Primary Care Information Resource (SPIRE) team. The analysis included complementary hospital admissions data for most of those conditions, provided by the PHS Scottish Burden of Disease (SBoD) team. For some conditions, the report also showed comparisons with other studies reporting on prevalence data, where available and considered robust.  

The 2022 general practice dataset did not cover the whole of Scotland. It comprised total counts of currently registered patients with a diagnosis ever recorded for each specified condition as of 8 April 2022. Data were not available for two of the 14 NHS regional Health Boards, nor for 21 general practices from the other 12 Health Boards. That dataset therefore covered general practices representing 72.7% of registered patients at the time of the data extract (referred to in this report as ‘coverage’). The incompleteness of this dataset was recognised as a limitation in that report.  

The SPIRE resource was closed in August 2023. Its key functions have been taken over by the Primary Care Intelligence Service for Scotland (PCIS), PHS’s new national general practice data extraction and analytical service. PCIS supports requests for aggregate data extracts from general practices. This approach has been used for PHS’s annual General Practice - disease prevalence data visualisation (PHS, 2025a) publications. The methodology and metadata (PHS, 2025b) for the most recent annual prevalence publication, published in July 2025, stated that the data covered 95.6% of Scottish general practices and 96.8% of registered patients. This provided confidence that a follow-up request for data on neurological conditions would achieve more comprehensive coverage of general practice registered patients compared with the 2022 dataset.