27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
The mean age of the 402 study residents was 86.7 years [range, 67-102 years]; 350 were white (87.1%) and 323 were female (80.3%), with DNH directives that by 6 months did not differ between arms (63% in both arms; adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 1.08; 95% CI, 0.69-1.69). 1 key finding →
Participants: 212 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Residents' mean age was 86.5 years, 39 (12.9%) were African American, and 246 (81.5%) were women. 1 key finding →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Most proxies select comfort as the preferred level of care for NH residents with advanced dementia. 5 key findings →
Participants: 402 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Better alignment between preferences for comfort-focused care and advance directives is needed in advanced dementia. 2 key findings →
Participants: 328 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Specialty palliative care consultation for hospitalized patients with late-stage dementia is feasible and promising to improve decision-making and some treatment outcomes. 1 key finding →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 62 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The methods we used for intervention fidelity allowed nursing home staff to implement a goals of care decision aid intervention for advanced dementia. 1 key finding →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 151 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A decision aid about feeding options in advanced dementia reduced decisional conflict for surrogates and increased their knowledge and communication about feeding options with providers. 1 key finding →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Seventeen randomized clinical trials tested decision tools in serious illness. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Most families chose comfort as the primary GOC. 4 key findings →
Participants: 302 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A novel method using an EHR phenotype plus brief medical record review is effective to identify hospitalized patients with late-stage dementia. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This cluster randomized clinical trial found that despite high adherence to the training, a multicomponent intervention promoting goal-directed care for suspected UTIs and LRIs did not significantly reduce antimicrobial use among nursing home residents with advanced dementia. 4 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Dementia is a leading cause of death in the United States. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Rates of hospice use observed in this study (22%) were considerably higher than previously reported, although persons with dementia may continue to be underreferred. 2 key findings →
Participants: 97 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Neurological diseases cause physical, psychosocial, and spiritual or existential suffering from the time of their diagnosis. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The decision-support intervention piloted in this study was feasible and relevant for surrogate decision-makers of persons with advanced dementia in NHs, and it improved quality of communication between SDM and NH providers. 1 key finding →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Consultations appear to reduce acute care use and (potentially) burdensome transitions for dying residents with dementia. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Although a high proportion of patients received elements of palliative care, transitions to a goal of comfort or hospice happened very near death. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Overuse or misuse of tests and treatments exposes patients to potential harm. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We noted no differences between decedents with and without dementia in terms of pain, psychosocial status, family involvement, advance care planning, most life-prolonging interventions, and hospice use. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Feeding and eating difficulties leading to weight loss are common in the advanced stages of dementia. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
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.
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.
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 →