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
Research
27,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Community-based palliative care of people who die with or of dementia is relatively infrequent but associated with significant reductions in hospital emergency department use in the last year of life. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 5,261 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Gatekeeping is motivated by the general assumption of vulnerability of patients, coupled with an emphasis on the duty to protect patients. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We recommend development and testing of decision aids targeting the decisions carers report finding most distressing, including those around where people should live, accessing services, and end of life treatments. 2 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
There is need for clearer articulation of the likely mechanisms by which advance care planning can lead to reduced care costs or improved cost-effectiveness, particularly for people who retain capacity. 3 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Current pharmacological therapy for Alzheimer's disease (AD) includes the cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) donepezil, rivastigmine, and galantamine and the N-methyl D-aspartate receptor antagonist memantine. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
These contrasting illness narratives affect and shape the experiences, thoughts, and fears of patients and their carers in the last months of life. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 156 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Nurses play a key role in the effective management of pain through the use of pain assessment tools, behavioural observation, and analgesic choice. 2 key findings →
Design: narrative review Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Pain and agitation were common and frequently persisted in residents with dementia during nursing home stay, but symptom management intensified only at the end of life. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Although patient factors remain associated with differential healthcare utilization at the end of life, utilization declined over time and use of palliative care services increased. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Response rate was 54.7%. The intense pain and symptoms of individuals with dementia was alleviated less often than those of individuals with cancer (odds ratio (OR) = 0.50, P < .001), and individuals with dementia were more likely to have life-prolonging treatment withheld or withdrawn (OR = 1.40, P = .048). 5 key findings →
Participants: 8,627 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
People continue to receive disease-focused therapies at the end of life rather than therapies exclusively for palliation of symptoms, suggesting that treatments may vary according to the person's primary diagnosis. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 2,623 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
[(18)F]flutemetamol amyloid PET detects primarily advanced stages of Aβ pathology in preclinical and symptomatic AD cases. 1 key finding →
Design: clinical trial Participants: 68 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Overall, patients dying as a result of non-cancer diseases were twice as likely to be admitted to ICUs at the EOL as patients dying due to cancer. 5 key findings →
Participants: 240,757 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
Optimal timing of ACP discussions should be determined by the readiness of the patient and family carer to face end of life. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The preferences of end-of-life issues differed greatly between dementia patients and their caregivers. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The RADAR tool proved to be efficient, reliable, sensitive and very well accepted by nursing staff. 3 key findings →
Participants: 142 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Most people in Germany die in institutions; the most common place of death is still the hospital, where more than half of all deaths take place. 2 key findings →
Participants: 24 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Community-based services are important for improving outcomes for individuals with dementia and their caregivers. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This review is one of the first to provide an overview of the available literature in relation to strategies used to improve the organisation of palliative care. 2 key findings →
Participants: 14 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Use of in-depth data, consensus methods and theoretical understanding of the intervention components produced an evidence-based intervention for further testing in end-of-life care in advanced dementia. 1 key finding →
Participants: 29 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The growth in hospice care for nursing home residents was associated with less aggressive care near death but at an overall increase in Medicare expenditures. 5 key findings →
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
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
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 27,780 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 27,780 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.1% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.3%), 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.
1,034 records (3.7% 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 →