31,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Atypical antipsychotic drugs may be associated with a small increased risk for death compared with placebo. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,353 Evidence: high
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Antipsychotic use compared with non-use in adults with dementia was associated with increased risks of stroke, venous thromboembolism, myocardial infarction, heart failure, fracture, pneumonia, and acute kidney injury, but not ventricular arrhythmia. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 173,910 Evidence: moderate
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The study cohort consisted of 178,441 older adults with dementia who were new users of ChEIs. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 23,433 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
There were no differences in measures of effectiveness between initiation of active treatments or placebo (which represented watchful waiting) but the placebo group had significantly lower health care costs. 3 key findings →
Design: clinical trial Participants: 421 Evidence: high
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In this national case-control study of nursing home residents with ADRD receiving hospice care, initiation of benzodiazepine or antipsychotic use was associated with increased 180-day mortality. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control Participants: 139,103 Evidence: moderate
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This study indicates no benefits for memantine in the long-term treatment and prophylaxis of clinically significant neuropsychiatric symptoms. 5 key findings →
Participants: 199 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In AD patients with symptoms of psychosis, agitation, or aggressive behavior, medications can have a small but significant impact on caregiver burden. 4 key findings →
Design: clinical trial Participants: 361 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study will provide clinically relevant data on the likelihood and time to relapse, and predictors of relapse, in patients switched from risperidone to placebo after response to risperidone treatment. 2 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Guidelines recommend limiting antipsychotic treatment to short-term use ( Methods Using UK primary care data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink, linked with hospital and mortality data from Jan 1, 1998, to March 31, 2021, we emulated two sets of target trials, one after 12 weeks of antipsychotic treatment and another after 24 weeks of antipsychotic treatment, to compare continuing treatment versus tapering treatment and continuing treatment versus abrupt discontinuation of treatment. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 24,822 Evidence: moderate
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Among nursing home residents with dementia, discontinuing long-term antipsychotic medication use was associated with lower risks of hospitalization, pneumonia, and urinary tract infections, suggesting clinical benefits in this population. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 4,222 Evidence: moderate
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The evidence base, although incomplete, suggests that modest treatment effect sizes are offset by risk of considerable adverse effects. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Compared with an AChEI-based conventional care strategy, lecanemab initiation was associated with comparable treatment persistence and lower observed risks of BPSD, emergency visit as well as reduced use of psychotropic and infection-related medications in exploratory analyses. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 589 Evidence: high
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With the sequential parallel comparison design, 152 patients received dextromethorphan-quinidine and 127 received placebo during the study. 3 key findings →
Design: clinical trial Participants: 93 Evidence: high
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These findings suggest medication-specific educational mailings targeting patients with AD or ADRD and their clinicians are not effective in reducing the use of high-risk medications. 4 key findings →
Design: open-label trial Participants: 787 Evidence: high
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We identified 1,994 records in five different databases; after exclusion of duplicates, title and abstract screening, and full-text retrieval, 122 studies were finally included. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Although antipsychotics were associated with greater harm than antidepressants and anticonvulsants in subgroups of persons with dementia, medications used in lieu of antipsychotics for treating neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia, such as anticonvulsants and dextromethorphan-quinidine, were also associated with harm. 5 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 209 Evidence: high
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Collaborative care for the treatment of Alzheimer disease resulted in significant improvement in the quality of care and in behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia among primary care patients and their caregivers. 5 key findings →
Participants: 84 Evidence: high
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ABSTRACTBackground:This systematic overview reports findings from systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions for behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). 3 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Neither quetiapine nor rivastigmine are effective in the treatment of agitation in people with dementia in institutional care. 4 key findings →
Participants: 93 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Our results suggest that risperidone may affect the CSF profile of AD biomarkers indicating more amyloid pathology. 5 key findings →
Participants: 44 Evidence: high
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Measurement of HL plasma levels may have potential usefulness as an adjunct in monitoring treatment response to oral HL in AD patients with psychosis or disruptive behavior. 5 key findings →
Participants: 40 Evidence: high
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The authors performed a 6-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group trial of carbamazepine (400 mg/day) with 21 agitated subjects (16 completers) who had been treated unsuccessfully with antipsychotics. 1 key finding →
Evidence: high
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Epilepsy is a cause of profound disability in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The major pharmacokinetic interactions identified concerned fluoxetine, paroxetine and ketoconazole when used with galantamine or donepezil. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex progressive brain degenerative disorder that has effects on multiple cerebral systems. 2 key findings →
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 31,380 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 31,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (65.6% of the library) and OpenAlex (16.2%), 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.
1,048 records (3.3% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 973 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 →
Newest studies, as a dated timeline → Atom feed Where this research is being discussed: events