Get help now — free helplines

You can call any of these for free. You do not need a diagnosis, an appointment, or a crisis to call — questions and plain exhaustion are reasons enough.

  • Alzheimer's Association 24/7 Helpline 800-272-3900 24 hours a day, 365 days a year Free, confidential support and information for people with dementia, caregivers, families and the public. Master's-level clinicians. Also Spanish.
  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 988 24/7 Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. For anyone in emotional distress or a mental-health crisis, including caregivers.
  • Alzheimer's Foundation of America (AFA) Helpline 866-232-8484 9:00 am - 9:00 pm ET, seven days a week Licensed social workers providing support, info and referrals. Also text message and web chat. Text: 646-586-5283

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.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria were met in 303 patients, and 25 (8.3%) presented to the ED with delirium. 1 key finding →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 303 Evidence: low

Delirium is a profound neuropsychiatric disturbance precipitated by acute illness. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 465 Evidence: moderate

Ultimately, we hope this project will provide the groundwork for future development of prevention and treatment strategies for delirium, designed to minimize the long term negative impact of delirium in older adults. 1 key finding →

Design: cohort study Participants: 550 Evidence: moderate

Delirium in the emergency department: an independent predictor of death within 6 months

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 60 out of 100. Annals of emergency medicine 2010-04-03

Study objective Delirium's adverse effect on long-term mortality in older hospitalized patients is well documented, whereas its effect in older emergency department (ED) patients remains unclear. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 628 Evidence: moderate

Our sample included 11,105 patients (median age 77, 51% female), with 2299 in the hallway group and 8806 in the non-hallway group. 5 key findings →

Design: retrospective cohort Participants: 11,105 Evidence: moderate

First, based on pooled results of RCTs, the melatonin agonists melatonin and ramelteon were not found to reduce delirium incidence (RR 0.94, 95% CI 0.72–1.22, k = 16 studies; RR 0.63, 95% CI 0.39–1.03, k = 8, respectively). 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 203 Evidence: high

Given the wealth of existing literature, future research should avoid simple risk factor evaluation except for novel candidates, validate existing prognostic models where possible, and instead focus on interventional research. 3 key findings →

Design: umbrella review Evidence: low

CSD is common in older inpatients and associated with considerably worse outcomes, with little variation between different types of CSD. 4 key findings →

Participants: 10,014 Evidence: moderate

Delirium increases risk of future cognitive decline and dementia, independent of illness severity and baseline cognition, with more episodes associated with worse cognitive outcomes. 5 key findings →

Participants: 205 Evidence: moderate

Elevated preoperative and postoperative plasma levels of C-reactive protein were associated with delirium, suggesting that a preinflammatory state and heightened inflammatory response to surgery are potential pathophysiologic mechanisms of delirium. 4 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 566 Evidence: moderate

The data from this study provide strong preliminary evidence that, in patients newly admitted to post-acute care facilities from acute care hospitals, delirium symptoms are prevalent, persistent, and associated with poor functional recovery. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 551 Evidence: moderate

The incidence of the first episode of delirium after hip surgery in the elderly was 1.87 events per 1000 PYs. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 118,682 Evidence: moderate

The DRS-R-98, a 16-item clinician-rated scale with 13 severity items and 3 diagnostic items, was validated against the Cognitive Test for Delirium (CTD), Clinical Global Impression scale (CGI), and Delirium Rating Scale (DRS) among five diagnostic groups (N=68): delirium, dementia, depression, schizophrenia, and other. 1 key finding →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 68 Evidence: moderate

Exercise therapy for the treatment of delirium in the intensive care unit

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 58 out of 100. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2025-08-12

Outcomes of interest were duration of delirium, health-related quality of life, delirium severity, cognitive function, mortality in the ICU, ICU length of stay, hospital length of stay and adverse events. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 491 Evidence: high

Postoperative delirium: a 76-year-old woman with delirium following surgery

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 57 out of 100. JAMA 2012-07-01

Delirium (acute confusion) complicates 15% to 50% of major operations in older adults and is associated with other major postoperative complications, prolonged length of stay, poor functional recovery, institutionalization, dementia, and death. 1 key finding →

Evidence: low

About 245 patients were included and postoperative delirium affected 12.2% (30/245) of the patients. 5 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 245 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
  • 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed