Innovative data solutions to support community-based prescription medication research

Medications are designed to help keep older people well, but they can also have unintended adverse effects. Healthy older people may be more resilient to these adverse effects, but investigation is limited by the structure of available data (i.e. free text). This thesis develops the innovative data solutions required to collect and code medication data from healthy, community-dwelling older adults, and uses the resultant data to examine the risk profile of common potentially inappropriate medications and medications with anticholinergic properties.