Cohort Profile: The Northern Ireland Cohort for the Longitudinal Study of Ageing (NICOLA).

All NICOLA participants are flagged on the National Health Applications and Infrastructure Services (NHAIS), which receives regular updates from the General Register Office on fact and cause of death; participants' registered address information is used to identify when a NICOLA cohort member has died. Permissions are currently being sought for linkage of NICOLA data to routinely collected health and social care data from the BSO and HBS[5], and also linkage with the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry[6]. Key Features The Northern Ireland Cohort for the Longitudinal Study of Ageing (NICOLA) is Northern Ireland's largest health and social care cohort collecting longitudinal data from a representative sample of the over-50s population. Key findings from the health assessment are also available in the NICOLA health assessment report, which can be accessed via https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/NICOLA/ReportsandNewsletters/. [Extracted from the article]