Kuopio Research Centre of Geriatric Care

The Kuopio Research Centre of Geriatric Care is an academic research organisation for geriatric pharmacotherapy, age-related diseases, nutrition and geriatric rehabilitation. Our multidisciplinary team of researchers includes physicians like geriatricians and psychiatrists, pharmacists, clinical pharmacologists, dentists, epidemiologists, nutritionists, and experts in rehabilitation. We provide doctoral level training for future leaders in research, clinical practice and teaching related to geriatric care,

We mainly perform register-based research and clinical intervention studies, currently including the MEDALZ cohort and NutOrMed study. Currently, the annual number of publications is 20-30 and number of PhD thesis varies between one and three.

We have expertise in:

• Register-based research including
  • Modelling of drug exposure from prescription register data
  • Pre-processing and linkage of register data
• pharmacoepidemiology and drug utilization
• adverse outcomes associated with drug use
• healthcare service use and costs, including drug costs
• epidemiology of diseases related to older age
• conducting intervention studies in the aged population, special focus on
  • malnutrition
  • oral health
  • falls

Our research projects include:

MEDALZ (MEDication use and ALZheimer’s disease) is a nationwide cohort study, including all community-dwelling persons diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in Finland during 2005-2011 (n=70,718). Comparison persons matched with age, gender and region of residence have been identified for each case. The data has been linked to multiple Finnish registers.