These findings highlight the potential benefits of palliative care in some non-cancer illnesses. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 6,936 Evidence: moderate
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.
FCC facilitates a palliative approach to care. 3 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The large number of well-characterized candidate facilities enabled several unique design features including stratification on historical hospitalization rates, randomization prior to recruitment, and 2:1 control to intervention facilities ratio. 1 key finding →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 119 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
74/100
This systematic review highlighted the lack of consensus regarding referral criteria for palliative care in patients with dementia and the need to identify timely triggers to standardize referral. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 43 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This will be vital in moving to a phase III trial that is pragmatic and feasible for these complex patients within the NHS. 2 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 40 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Despite increased use of analgesics, pain is still prevalent in people with dementia. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Participants: 12 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
73/100
During the study period, 82,118 patients with dementia (mean (SD) age, 83.04 (10.04), 51,170 (62.21%) female) underwent an acute hospitalization, of which 41,227 (50.27%) received care in hospitals that implemented a palliative care program. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 82,118 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
There is a need for more high-quality outcome studies, particularly using randomized designs to control for confounding. 2 key findings →
Participants: 18 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Advance care planning was effective in reducing family carer uncertainty in decision-making concerning the care of their family member and improving perceptions of quality of care in nursing homes. 2 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 24 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
72/100
Mean ADAQ scores were: Dialysis Living Will, 71%; Centre for Bioethics Living Will, 70%; and Medical Directive, 60% (F = 8.27, P < 0.001 (repeat measures analysis of variance); the Dialysis Living Will and Centre for Bioethics Living Will scored significantly higher than the Medical Directive). 2 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Of 4267 participants with probable dementia in HRS, the mean (SD) age was 82.2 (7.6) years, 2930 (survey-weighted 69.4%) were female, and 785 (survey-weighted 12.1%) identified as Black. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,404 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Future research should focus on ways to involve people with dementia in decision-making through supported means. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Participants: 16 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
Early specialist PC exposure reduced the risk of hospital-based acute care in the last 30 days of life for all chronic disease groups except dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 169 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A risk score based on 12 variables from the MDS estimates 6-month mortality for nursing home residents with advanced dementia with greater accuracy than existing prognostic guidelines. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 6,799 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Patients with advanced dementia often receive poor end-of-life care. 5 key findings →
Participants: 33 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Surgical repair of a hip fracture was associated with lower mortality among NH residents with advanced dementia and should be considered together with the residents' goals of care in management decisions. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,441 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
It was difficult for a palliative care research team to influence the care of advanced dementia patients in the acute hospital setting. 3 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 99 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
End-of-life care and research that focuses only on cognitive and functional decline may fail to recognise the complexities and unmet needs relevant to dementia and end of life. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
ED attendance in the last year of life for people with dementia is common and is increasing. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 4,867 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Decision-making interventions typically consist of multiple components which aim to establish preferences for future health care. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
All 23 were able to articulate their end-of-life wishes very or somewhat coherently during the SPIRIT session; of those, 14 PWDs had moderate dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
These data indicate the high symptom burden of persons with dementia in Germany at the end of their lives. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 5,000 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This review highlights the complexities of pain in NH residents and has implications for both clinical practice and future research. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
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 →