451 (11%) of 4241 beds in ten hospitals were included in the analyses. 3 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 118 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Research
27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Professional caregivers may initiate ACP early if strategies carefully consider timing and family and patient receptiveness or reluctance, and are family and patient-centered. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 33 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The late initiation of palliative care (especially when advance care planning is lacking) and palliative care for residents without cancer, dementia or closely involved relatives deserve attention in all countries. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,298 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The results highlight the need to integrate palliative care with optimal disease management in primary practice and to initiate advance care planning early in the chronic disease trajectory to enable all patients to live as well as possible with progressive illness and die with dignity and comfort. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,491 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Specialist palliative care is not initiated in almost half of the people for whom it could be beneficial, most frequently because physicians deem regular caregivers to be sufficiently skilled in addressing palliative care needs. 1 key finding →
Participants: 6,188 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Awareness of the terminal nature of dementia may improve patient comfort at the end of life. 2 key findings →
Participants: 372 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Nursing home residents receiving palliative care are more likely to have a GP order. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The results of our study contribute to a better understanding of the factors hindering GPs in initiating ACP. 2 key findings →
Participants: 36 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Prevalence of ACPs and formal authorization of a legal representative was low among the deceased NH residents in Flanders, Belgium. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We found that family satisfaction with care is related to a comfort care goal shortly after admission, but quality of dying did not. 5 key findings →
Participants: 148 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Awareness of palliative care as an option for patients with COPD needs to increase in palliative care services, physicians and the general public. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The current practice of palliative care in Belgium is far from the presently considered ideal palliative care approaches. 1 key finding →
Participants: 20 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
ACP is a multifactorial process, which may lean on professional caregivers' guidance. 2 key findings →
Participants: 26 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
41/100
Physicians often withhold potentially burdensome life-prolonging treatment in nursing home residents in all stages of dementia in the Netherlands. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Place of death of older people who died from a dementia-related disease differs substantially between countries, which might point to organizational differences in end-of-life care provision. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Regardless of the dementia stage, many nursing home residents develop serious clinical complications and symptoms in the last phase of life, posing major challenges to the provision of optimum end-of-life care. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Communication regarding care is rarely patient driven and more often professional caregiver or family driven. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This qualitative study about the experiences and perceptions of family carers of people with a chronic life-limiting illness living at home regarding the collaboration with different healthcare providers in the last phase life, showed that family carers experience a lot of possibilities, but perceive missed opportunities as well, for healthcare professionals to effectively collaborate with them for palliative care. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We developed a comprehensive set of quality indicators of appropriate and inappropriate end-of-life care in people with Alzheimer's disease, cancer or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, to be used in population-level research. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
36/100
End-of-life transitions between health care settings are common across EU countries, in particular late hospitalizations for people residing at home. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
According to the NH staff, fairly good quality care was provided, but the psychosocial and spiritual aspects of care need to be addressed more in the last days of the dying NH patient's life. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The early integration of specialist palliative care has been shown to benefit the quality of life of patients with advanced cancer. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
36/100
Our results help to elucidate the tasks and roles required of FPs to make integration of a palliative care approach into the care continuum possible. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Several areas of end-of-life care provision could be improved. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Where “Free full text” comes from
Free full text links and the Full text may need a subscription label come from Unpaywall, Europe PMC and OpenAlex records of free copies, checked 10 Oct 2026. A study with neither is unknown, not paywalled. Show only studies that are free to read
How the 0–100 score works — and why some entries are capped
This is alzhub's own score. It is not an official metric, not an impact factor, and no journal, publisher or ranking body endorses it. We built it so that a reader who is not a scientist can tell a landmark trial from a conference abstract without having to already know the difference. Every point comes from one of 20 components, all of them printed on the study itself, so you can disagree with our arithmetic rather than having to trust the total.
- Journal tier up to 10 pts
- Journal's citation record up to 4 pts
- Study design up to 12 pts
- Strength of evidence up to 5 pts
- Peer-review validation up to 10 pts
- How recent up to 5 pts
- Sample size up to 4 pts
- Effect reported up to 3 pts
- Studied in people up to 3 pts
- Randomised / blinded up to 2 pts
- Times cited up to 7 pts
- Citations per year up to 5 pts
- Impact for its field and year up to 6 pts
- Cited by studies here up to 6 pts
- Still being cited up to 4 pts
- Senior author's track record up to 4 pts
- Institution's track record up to 3 pts
- Multi-centre collaboration up to 3 pts
- Indexed in PubMed up to 2 pts
- Free to read up to 2 pts
Journals are placed in ordered tiers, never given a numeric impact factor — we could not verify current impact factors from a source we control, and an invented one would be worse than none. Tier 1 is the top-tier general journals (NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA, Nature, Science, Nature Medicine); tier 2 is the leading specialty journals; tier 3 is every other peer-reviewed journal. A separate part scores how much the journal's own papers are cited, which tells the tier-3 journals apart.
Two rules we don't bend. First, we never fill in a missing value: if a record does not state a sample size or a design, that component scores zero, and if we simply have no data for a part, such as a citation count, that part is left out and the study is scored on the parts we could check. The study card says which. Second, anything that is not a peer-reviewed article is capped at 16/100 and carries a warning chip — so a conference abstract or a company press release can never outrank a peer-reviewed paper, no matter how good it looks.
We rank a rigorous null result — a good trial showing that something does not work — above an early positive finding. Someone deciding whether to buy a supplement is served by that, and the rigour is already counted by the design and journal components.
The score is computed from the published data alone and is reproducible: the same file always yields the same numbers.
See the whole rubric drawn out → — four charts covering all 27,380 studies: how the scores are spread and where the cap bites, which of the 20 components the library is strong and weak on, which subjects rest on stronger evidence, and what kinds of study each subject is actually built from.
What this library is — and isn't
This is a large sample of the Alzheimer's literature, not an exhaustive index of it. It holds 27,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (60.6% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.6%), plus smaller pulls from PubMed, Crossref and medRxiv. If a study, a drug, or a finding isn't here, that is not evidence it doesn't exist in the literature — it may simply not have been pulled in yet.
1,032 records (3.8% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 962 of those are preprints posted before any journal review, and the rest are conference abstracts, regulatory notices and reports. Every study card on this page states its status plainly, and the score above is capped for anything that isn't a peer-reviewed article.
See the full, machine-readable breakdown of this library's coverage →