27,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
The study findings suggest delirium was a strong risk factor for death and incident dementia among older adult patients. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 110,422 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Compared with the reference standard for diagnosing delirium, 2 study nurses using the CAM-ICU had sensitivities of 100% and 93%, specificities of 98% and 100%, and high interrater reliability (kappa = 0.96; 95% confidence interval, 0.92-0.99). 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 111 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The risk of dementia or MCI at follow-up is almost doubled in elderly hip surgery patients with postoperative delirium compared with at-risk patients without delirium. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 112 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Delirium can accelerate the trajectory of cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer disease (AD). 2 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort Participants: 72 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results Eighteen studies were included. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
When compared with propofol, dexmedetomidine sedation reduced incidence, delayed onset, and shortened duration of POD in elderly patients after cardiac surgery. 3 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
There were 987 participants (290 from Vantaa 85+, 241 from the Cambridge City Over-75s Cohort, and 456 from the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study) with neuropathologic data; mean (SD) age at death was 90 (6.4) years, including 682 women (69%). 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 987 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Our findings suggest that clinicians should consider sedative-associated, hypoxic, and septic delirium, which often co-occur, as distinct indicators of acute brain injury and seek to identify all potential risk factors that may impact on long-term cognitive impairment, especially those that are iatrogenic and potentially modifiable such as sedation. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,048 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
It is associated with increases in mortality, physical morbidity, length of hospital stay, institutionalisation and costs to healthcare providers. 4 key findings →
Participants: 833 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Elderly patients with a hip fracture are vulnerable for delirium, especially when the patient has dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 168 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Our findings suggest that older patients with reduced preoperative cognitive functions or who develop postoperative delirium are at risk of developing dementia within 5 years after cardiac surgery. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 114 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Major postoperative complications and delirium are separately associated with adverse events and demonstrate a combined effect. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 566 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Of 23 558 people without pre-existing dementia, 4135 (17·6%) had an admission with delirium. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 23,558 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The incidence and prevalence of delirium in hospitals appears to be stable, though publication bias may have masked true changes. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Delirium is the most common manifestation of brain dysfunction in critically ill patients. 5 key findings →
Participants: 25,000 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Decrease in delirium scores were not significantly different comparing the effect of low dose haloperidol (< 3.0 mg per day) with the atypical antipsychotics olanzapine and risperidone (Odds ratio 0.63 (95% CI 10.29 - 1.38; p = 0.25). 5 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This cohort study found that delirium was associated with a 40% acceleration in the slope of cognitive decline out to 72 months following elective surgery. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 560 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
DSD is a strong predictor of functional dependence, institutionalization, and mortality in older patients admitted to a rehabilitation setting, suggesting that strategies to detect DSD routinely in practice should be developed and DSD should be included in prognostic models of health care. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,642 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Our results demonstrate delirium is a significant marker of mortality among seniors in the ED, and mortality risk is most salient in the first 3 months following an ED visit. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 26 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Despite methodologic limitations, certain risk factors for delirium seem to be consistent and could help identify high-risk patients. 3 key findings →
Participants: 1,365 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Delirium is an acute change in cognition, common in hospitalized older adults, and associated with high healthcare and human cost; however, delirium's genetic and proteomic background remains poorly understood. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,059,130 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In patients aged 65 years and older undergoing hip fracture surgery, regional anesthesia without sedation did not significantly reduce the incidence of postoperative delirium compared with general anesthesia. 3 key findings →
Design: open-label trial Participants: 476 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The use of benzodiazepines or opioids in the ICU is associated with longer duration of a first episode of delirium. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 304 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Preoperative determination of dementia status is important for risk stratification for incident delirium after acute hip fracture repair surgery because types and magnitude of predisposing risk factors for postoperative delirium substantially differ based on preoperative dementia status. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 284 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Delirium developed in 27 of 107 patients (25%) in the development cohort. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 107 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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 27,780 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.
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 →