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
Research
27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
We present a range of trigger tools spanning different hospital settings and patient populations. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Participants: 17,000 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
Fifty-two studies (20 randomised; 32 non-randomised) with 4786 participants diagnosed with cancer (n = 4491), dementia (n = 43), AIDS (n = 235), spasticity (n = 16), NORSE syndrome (n = 1) were included. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 4,491 Evidence: high
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
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
68/100
Prioritizing measures that distinguish the assessment of care from the assessment of dying, and secondarily that exhibit an acceptable factor structure, this study recommends two measures of care-the Family Perceptions of Physician-Family Caregiver Communication and the End of Life in Dementia (EOLD)-Satisfaction With Care-and two measures of outcomes-the EOLD-Symptom Management and the EOLD-Comfort Assessment in Dying. 5 key findings →
Participants: 264 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A mortality risk score derived from MDS data predicted six-month survival in advanced dementia with moderate accuracy. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 22,405 Evidence: moderate
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
The lack of content surrounding grief represents a gap for this population at high risk for complicated grief and chronic sorrow. 3 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
There are commonalities in the prevalence of problems across cancer and non-cancer patients, highlighting the need for palliative care to be provided irrespective of diagnosis. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 57 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Successful strategies from other disciplines could be considered by palliative care researchers. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Among the 77 papers reviewed, few addressed early stages of dementia specifically. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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
60/100
Among hospitalized patients with serious illness, documented goals-of-care discussions identified by NLP were more common among patients with older age and increased burden of acute or chronic illness, and less common among racially or ethnically minoritized patients. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Patients continue to receive medications that are not prescribed as symptomatic treatment despite having a LLE. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
57/100
Eighty six thousand three hundred ninety-six beneficiaries were included (43,198 beneficiaries with ADRD and 43,198 beneficiaries without ADRD). 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The sample included 993 decedents with dementia (81.4% white; 11.0% black, 7.6% hispanic). 5 key findings →
Participants: 993 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Pain is an understudied problem in frail elderly patients, especially those with cognitive impairment, delirium, or dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 325 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Our findings support need for greater ACP discussions between patients and proxies. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 14 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Medicare Advantage (MA) cares for an increasing proportion of traditional Medicare (TM) patients although, the association of MA on low-value care among hospitalized patients is uncertain. 3 key findings →
Design: retrospective cohort Participants: 147,153 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
To evaluate the impact hospice enrollment has on the terminal care of patients with dementia and describe the symptom burden these patients experience, caregivers of dementia decedents were assessed in a mortality follow-back survey. 5 key findings →
Participants: 135 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Dementia is a leading cause of death in the USA. 3 key findings →
Participants: 8,686 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Thirty constitutive elements of ACP were identified (e.g., 'assess understanding of ACP'). 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Three cohorts of interdisciplinary scholars (N = 53) have started and two have completed DEM-PCCT. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 53 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 →