The absence of long-term clinical registries in aesthetic medicine and its consequences for research and patient outcomes

The fast proliferation of aesthetic medicine has increased the necessity of evidence-based assessment of treatment effects, but the lack of long-term clinical registries still does not provide access to stable real-world evidence. This paper discusses the issue of disjointed data infrastructures and its consequences in terms of research quality and patient outcomes. The main aim is to evaluate how the presence of clinical registries affects the patient outcomes in the field of aesthetic medicine and how real-world data and data quality mediate this effect. The methodology is premised on a panel econometric model, which relies on data in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Poland between 2021 and 2025. The specification of a fixed effect is used to address the unobserved heterogeneity by country and time. The model considers such critical variables as registry availability, index of real-world data, patient-reported outcomes adoption, data quality and clinical experience.