TY - JOUR T1 - Drug prescriptions and dementia incidence: a medication-wide association study of 17000 dementia cases among half a million participants JF - Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health JO - J Epidemiol Community Health DO - 10.1136/jech-2021-217090 SP - jech-2021-217090 AU - Tim Wilkinson AU - Christian Schnier AU - Kathryn Bush AU - Kristiina Rannikmäe AU - Ronan A Lyons AU - Stuart McTaggart AU - Marion Bennie AU - Cathie LM Sudlow Y1 - 2021/09/09 UR - http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2021/09/09/jech-2021-217090.abstract N2 - Background Previous studies have suggested that some medications may influence dementia risk. We conducted a hypothesis-generating medication-wide association study to investigate systematically the association between all prescription medications and incident dementia.Methods We used a population-based cohort within the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank, comprising routinely-collected primary care, hospital admissions and mortality data from Wales, UK. We included all participants born after 1910 and registered with a SAIL general practice at ≤60 years old. Follow-up was from each participant’s 60th birthday to the earliest of dementia diagnosis, deregistration from a SAIL general practice, death or the end of 2018. We considered participants exposed to a medication if they received ≥1 prescription for any of 744 medications before or during follow-up. We adjusted for sex, smoking and socioeconomic status. The outcome was any all-cause dementia code in primary care, hospital or mortality data during follow-up. We used Cox regression to calculate hazard ratios and Bonferroni-corrected p values.Results Of 551 344 participants, 16 998 (3%) developed dementia (median follow-up was 17 years for people who developed dementia, 10 years for those without dementia). Of 744 medications, 221 (30%) were associated with dementia. Of these, 217 (98%) were associated with increased dementia incidence, many clustering around certain indications. Four medications (all vaccines) were associated with a lower dementia incidence.Conclusions Almost a third of medications were associated with dementia. The clustering of many drugs around certain indications may provide insights into early manifestations of dementia. We encourage further investigation of hypotheses generated by these results.Data are available in a public, open access repository. Aggregated results are available in a public, open access respository. Raw data are available following application to the SAIL databank and approval from the Information Governance Review Panel. ER -