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In a medical emergency, call 911. More numbers, and what each line does, on the help page.

Find studies

A note on reading research. One study is rarely the final word.

We try to note the size of a study, whether it was in humans or animals, and how early-stage the finding is. If a summary here doesn't make that clear, treat it with extra caution and check the original source.

Delirium and incident dementia in hospital patients in New South Wales, Australia: retrospective cohort study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. BMJ 2024-03-27

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interventions for preventing delirium in hospitalised patients

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 69 out of 100. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews 2007-04-18

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

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

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

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

Antipsychotics for delirium

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews 2007-04-18

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

Six-Year Cognitive Trajectory in Older Adults Following Major Surgery and Delirium

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. JAMA internal medicine 2023-05-01

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

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

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

The current study investigated several factors that might increase the risk of mortality in elderly patients with hip fracture. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 223,875 Evidence: high

The results of this meta-analysis demonstrate that cognitive impairment and delirium are major issues in CABG patients which require specific attention. 2 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 91,829 Evidence: high

Overall, mental and neurological disorders were associated with a significant high risk of infection (pre-existing mental: OR 1·67, 95% CI 1·12-2·49; and pre-existing neurological: 2·05, 1·58-2·67), illness severity (mental: pre-existing, 1·40, 1·25-1·57; sequelae, 4·85, 2·53-9·32; neurological: pre-existing, 1·43, 1·09-1·88; sequelae, 2·17, 1·45-3·24), and mortality (mental: pre-existing, 1·47, 1·26-1·72; neurological: pre-existing, 2·08, 1·61-2·69; sequelae, 2·03, 1·66-2·49) from COVID-19. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 149 Evidence: high

Early identification and management of OD should consider geriatric syndromes and neurogenic comorbidities to prevent malnutrition and pneumonia and reduce mortality in adults aged 60 years and older. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 31,488 Evidence: high

Thinning of retinal layers, measured using optical coherence tomography (OCT), is associated with some neurodegenerative disorders such as established Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 622 Evidence: high

Age and frailty are independently associated with adverse outcomes in COVID-19. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 5,711 Evidence: moderate

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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
  • Randomized / 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
  • Multicenter 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 31,780 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 31,780 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (66% of the library) and OpenAlex (16%), 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.

1,052 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