Longitudinal associations between different dementia diagnoses and medication use jointly accounting for dropout

Background: Longitudinal studies of older adults are characterized by high dropout rates, multimorbid conditions, and multiple medication use, especially proximal to death. We studied the association between multiple medication use and incident dementia diagnoses including Alzheimer's disease (AD), vascular dementia (VD), and Lewy-body dementia (LBD), simultaneously accounting for dropout.Methods: Using the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center data with three years of follow-up, a set of covariate-Adjusted models that ignore dropout was fit to complete-case data, and to the whole-cohort data. Additionally, covariate-Adjusted joint models with shared random effects accounting for dropout were fit to the whole-cohort data.