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Background: This descriptive study assessed the completeness, agreement, and representativeness of ethnicity recording in the United Kingdom (UK) Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) primary care databases alone and, for those patients registered with a GP in England, when linked to secondary care data from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). Methods: Ethnicity records were assessed for all patients in the May 2021 builds of the CPRD GOLD and CPRD Aurum databases for all UK patients. In analyses of the UK, English data was from combined CPRD-HES, whereas data from Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales drew from CPRD only. The agreement of ethnicity records per patient was assessed within each dataset (CPRD GOLD, CPRD Aurum, and HES datasets) and between datasets at the highest level ethnicity categorisation ('Asian', 'black', 'mixed', 'white', 'other'). Representativeness was assessed by comparing the ethnic distributions at the highest-level categorisation of CPRD-HES to those from the Census 2011 across the UK's devolved administrations. Additionally, CPRD-HES was compared to the experimental ethnic distributions for England and Wales from the Office for National Statistics in 2019 (ONS2019) and the English ethnic distribution from May 2021 from NHS Digital's General Practice Extraction Service Data for Pandemic Planning and Research with HES data linkage (GDPPR-HES). Results: In CPRD-HES, 81.7% of currently registered patients in the UK had ethnicity recorded in primary care. For patients with multiple ethnicity records, mismatched ethnicity within individual primary and secondary care datasets was < 10%. Of English patients with ethnicity recorded in both CPRD and HES, 93.3% of records matched at the highest-level categorisation; however, the level of agreement was markedly lower in the 'mixed' and 'other' ethnic groups. CPRD-HES was less proportionately 'white' compared to the UK Census 2011 (80.3% vs. 87.2%) and experimental ONS2019 data (80.4% vs. 84.3%). CPRD-HES was aligned with the ethnic distribution from GDPPR-HES ('white' 80.4% vs. 80.7%); however, with a smaller proportion classified as 'other' (1.1% vs. 2.8%). Conclusions: CPRD-HES has suitable representation of all ethnic categories with some overrepresentation of minority ethnic groups and a smaller proportion classified as 'other' compared to the UK general population from other data sources. CPRD-HES data is useful for studying health risks and outcomes in typically underrepresented groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To investigate whether herpes zoster (HZ) was associated with subsequent increased risk of dementia diagnosis. Methods: We conducted a historical cohort study using primary care electronic health records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink in the United Kingdom. Individuals with incident HZ aged ≥40 years from 2000 to 2017 were matched with up to four individuals without HZ by age, sex, primary care practise and calendar time. The primary outcome was a new diagnosis of all‐cause dementia. We used the Cox proportional hazards regression adjusting for demographic, lifestyle and clinical confounders to assess any association between HZ and dementia. We investigated interactions with sex, frailty index and antiviral treatment and conducted various sensitivity analyses. Results: The cohort comprised 177,144 individuals with HZ and 706,901 matched unexposed individuals (median age 65 years (IQR 55.1–75.0), 40% male) followed for a median duration of 4.6 years (IQR 2.0–8.1). In total, 26,585 (3%) patients had an incident dementia diagnosis recorded and 113,056 patients died (12.8%). HZ was associated with a small reduction in dementia diagnosis (adjusted HR 0.92 (95% CI 0.89–0.95)), occurring predominantly in frail individuals and females. For patients who were fit (578,115, 65%), no association was seen (adjusted HR 0.97, 95% CI 0.92–1.02). There was no association between HZ and a composite outcome of dementia or death (adjusted HR 1.00, 95% CI 0.99–1.02). Dementia risk did not vary by prescription of antiviral agents. Sensitivity analyses showed consistent results. Interpretation: HZ was not associated with increased dementia diagnosis in a UK primary care‐based cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]