Each study has a usefulness score out of 100 (rubric version 4.0). Tap a score to see what makes it up.
Highest usefulness score first. Studies without a score come last.
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We identified three major methodological weaknesses: (1) over-reliance on one data source, (2) poor verification of statistical assumptions of Cox and logistic regression, and (3) lack of validation.
Why it matters
This systematic review of 137 publications on dementia risk prediction models identified machine learning, logistic regression, and Cox regression as the most commonly used methodologies. Three major methodological weaknesses were found: over-reliance on one data source, poor verification of statistical assumptions, and lack of validation.
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The benefits of expanding funding for Medicaid long-term care home and community-based services (HCBS) relative to institutional care are often taken as self-evident.
Why it matters
This analysis of national Medicaid claims found similar overall hospitalization rates for home and community-based services and nursing facility users, with racial and ethnic disparities in hospitalization and spending, including among people with dementia. It concerns long-term care settings and disparities, not the treatment, cure, or prevention of Alzheimer's disease.
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There is an urgent need for greater consideration of the ethical and legal implications that remote technological monitoring might have upon workforce morale, recruitment and retention.
Why it matters
This qualitative study of three dementia-specialist care facilities found that using monitoring technologies for workforce monitoring was understood in relation to the duty of care to residents, with little recognition of negative implications for staff. It addresses ethical and practical issues in long-term care and does not test any treatment, cure or prevention for Alzheimer's disease.
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Intraindividual cognitive variability (IIV), a measure of within-person variability across cognitive measures at a single time point, is associated with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Why it matters
This study found that variability in cognitive test performance was linked to brain atrophy and functional decline in older adults without dementia. It is about a marker of early changes and does not report any treatment, cure, or prevention for Alzheimer's disease.
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44/100
Dementia, a chronic and progressive cognitive declination of brain function caused by disease or impairment, is becoming more prevalent due to the aging population.
Why it matters
This review found that most automated diagnostic studies using neuroimaging and machine learning have focused on Alzheimer's disease, while identifying other types of dementia remains a major challenge. Multimodal imaging with deep learning showed promising results for diagnosing these other dementias, but this is a review of existing work rather than a new treatment or cure.
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44/100
Greater spend on social care (including availability of care home places) was associated with reduced spend in health care, with shorter length of hospital stay and decrease in readmissions.
Why it matters
This editorial view reports that greater spending on social care, including care home places, was associated with reduced health care spending, shorter hospital stays, and fewer readmissions. It also notes that malnutrition is twice as common in rural versus urban areas and more common in older women than men.
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With increased numbers of older people a higher burden of neurological disorders worldwide is predicted.
Why it matters
This review reports that hypertension is the strongest modifiable risk factor for stroke in Africa, and that strokes from cerebral small vessel disease are higher than 30% among sub-Saharan Africans. It does not test any treatment or prevention for dementia.
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Approximately 12% of apparently previously cognitively well patients undergoing anaesthesia and noncardiac surgery will develop symptoms of cognitive dysfunction after their procedure.
Why it matters
This review states that postoperative cognitive dysfunction is usually self-limiting and rarely persists long term, and that no individual anaesthetic technique, drug, or monitoring method has been proven to reduce its incidence. It recommends preoperative assessment and a multidisciplinary care bundle approach to identify and reduce risk factors.
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The number of the elderly across the globe will approximate 2.1 billion by 2050.
Why it matters
This review argues that physical activity, cognitive engagement, and diet are a key strategy for maintaining brain health during aging, based on translational studies. It is a review of mechanisms and relationships, not a clinical trial of a treatment or cure.
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Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) represents a transitional stage from normal aging to Alzheimer's disease (AD) and corresponds to a higher risk of developing AD.
Why it matters
This study combined brain imaging analysis with a statistical model to look for risk factors linked to conversion from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease in 234 people. It is about predicting progression, not treating or preventing the disease.
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Subjects with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show loss of cognitive functions and change in behavioral and functional state affecting the quality of their daily life and that of their families and caregivers.
Why it matters
This study used machine learning on neuropsychological test data to classify people with none, mild, or severe impairment, finding some tests were better predictors than others. It is about improving assessment and does not test any treatment, cure, or prevention for Alzheimer's disease.
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44/100
Clinical assessment of brain function relies heavily on indirect behavior-based tests.
Why it matters
This paper proposes a framework for extracting event-related brain potentials as potential brain vital signs for monitoring brain function. It confirmed specific ERPs at the individual level and age-related differences, but it is a monitoring framework, not a treatment or cure for Alzheimer's disease.
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After two decades of research on nutrition and dementia there is strong evidence for preventive effects of vitamin E, B vitamins, and n-3 fatty acids and deleterious effects of saturated fat on dementia.
Why it matters
This overview states there is strong evidence for preventive effects of vitamin E, B vitamins and n-3 fatty acids and deleterious effects of saturated fat, and describes the MIND diet as incorporating Mediterranean and DASH elements modified for brain neuroprotection. It also notes that evidence on nutrients and the Mediterranean diet has been inconsistent, so no dietary approach is established as preventive.
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Using the time-dependent Cox model, the adjusted dementia rate ratios (95% confidence-interval) among current and former users were 0.90(0.70-1.16) and 0.89 (0.71-1.10), respectively.
Why it matters
This study found no difference in dementia risk between users and non-users of ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers in people with heart failure. It does not support these medications as a way to prevent dementia.
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In resting state condition, aMCI small-world architecture presents midway topological properties between AD subjects and healthy controls, confirming the hypothesis that aMCI is an intermediate step along the disease progression.
Why it matters
This study found that people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment had brain network properties that fell between those of healthy older adults and people with Alzheimer's disease. The findings describe brain changes associated with disease progression but do not test any treatment or prevention.
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In almost all tissues, including the brain, folates are required for one-carbon transfer reactions, which are essential for the synthesis of DNA and RNA nucleotides, the metabolism of amino acids and the occurrence of methylation reactions.
Why it matters
This review reports that low folate status is associated with mild cognitive impairment, dementia (particularly Alzheimer's disease) and depression in older people, with proposed mechanisms including hyperhomocysteinemia and altered methylation. However, there is currently no consistent evidence that folic acid supplementation improves cognitive function or slows cognitive decline, so folate supplementation cannot be recommended for this purpose based on this review.
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The IDEA cognitive screen performed well in these populations and should prove useful in screening for dementia and delirium in other areas of sub-Saharan Africa.
Why it matters
This study validated a cognitive screening tool called IDEA for detecting major cognitive impairment in hospital settings in Nigeria and Tanzania. It is about improving dementia detection in populations with low levels of formal education, not about treating or curing the disease.
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Each syndrome can be associated with one or more underlying neuropathological diagnoses and are referred to as frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD).
Why it matters
For frontotemporal dementia, riluzole is indicated for motor neuron disease symptoms, and a small percentage of patients may improve with a trial of carbidopa-levodopa, though FTD-related parkinsonism is generally not responsive to dopamine replacement. Speech therapy may help manage aphasia, apraxia, and dysarthria symptoms.
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Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is common in the elderly, in whom it carries a more substantial burden of hepatic (nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma) and extra-hepatic manifestations and complications (cardiovascular disease, extrahepatic neoplasms) than in younger age groups.
Why it matters
This review discusses nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in the elderly, including its link with dementia, and states that further epidemiological and pathophysiological insight is warranted. It does not test any treatment, cure, or prevention for Alzheimer's disease.
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44/100
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a brief cognitive screening instrument developed by Nasreddine et al. to detect mild cognitive impairment, a high-risk condition for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.
Why it matters
This study collected normative data on the Italian version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment in 225 healthy Italian subjects aged 60 to 80. It provides reference values for a cognitive screening instrument and does not treat, cure or prevent Alzheimer's disease.
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The increasing prevalence of cognitive impairment among the older adult population warrants attention to the identification of practices that may minimize the progression of early forms of cognitive impairment, including the transitional stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), to permanent stages of dementia.
Why it matters
A 2013 review on why some people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which the authors call a "transitional stage", go on to develop dementia. It brings together "markers of disease progress and risk factors linked to the progression of MCI to dementia". It suggests that the "potentially modifiable" factors "may offer researchers a point of intervention", which is a direction for future research, not a proven way to prevent dementia.
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Awareness of palliative care as an option for patients with COPD needs to increase in palliative care services, physicians and the general public.
Why it matters
This population-based study found that patients with severe dementia were referred to palliative care services (37%) more often than patients with COPD (20%) but less often than those with cancer (60%). It describes patterns of end-of-life care referral rather than any treatment, cure or prevention of dementia.
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44/100
Advances in automatic text classification have been necessitated by the rapid increase in the availability of digital documents.
Why it matters
Machine learning algorithms classified speech samples from 32 semantic dementia patients versus 10 healthy controls with over 90% accuracy, and distinguished left- versus right-predominant temporal lobe atrophy with up to 88% accuracy. This is about classifying a related dementia from language and does not test any treatment, cure or prevention for Alzheimer's disease.
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Studies of high body mass index (BMI) and cognition in the elderly have shown conflicting results.
Why it matters
In a population sample of 1,949 people aged 65 or over in central Spain, overweight and obese participants did worse on formal neuropsychological tests than those with a BMI below 25. Earlier studies had disagreed on whether high BMI harms or helps cognition in older age; the authors say these results support a harmful effect, though a cross-sectional study shows an association, not cause.
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Several minor changes were made to the RUD instrument to improve the accuracy and precision of the data while maintaining comparability with the original version and reflecting current medical practice.
Why it matters
This study updated the Resource Utilization in Dementia questionnaire to improve its face validity for Alzheimer's disease clinical research and health care resource allocation. It is about a cost and resource measurement tool and does not test any treatment, cure, or prevention for Alzheimer's disease.
From across this topic
10 of the 7,967 studies in this topic, picked by a fixed rule (a hash of each study's address), not by score or date; each page of this list shows a different 10. The same 10 appear here every time.
- Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of outdoor air pollution exposure and cognitive function in UK Biobank
- A 10-year study of the incidence of and factors predicting dementia in Parkinson's disease
- Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain
- Regional Differences in Dementia Incidence Among US Veterans
- The Rush Memory and Aging Project: study design and baseline characteristics of the study cohort
- Prevalence of Post-stroke Cognitive Impairment and Dementia in a Sudanese Cohort: A Single-center Retrospective Study
- Sensitivity and False Alarm Rate of a Fall Sensor in Long-Term Fall Detection in the Elderly
- The Impact of COVID-19 Infection and Enforced Prolonged Social Isolation on Neuropsychiatric Symptoms in Older Adults With and Without Dementia: A Review
- Experiences of dementia in farming communities: A scoping review
- What does the general public understand about prevention and treatment of dementia? A systematic review of population-based surveys