Ginkgo biloba for mild to moderate dementia in a community setting: a pragmatic, randomised, parallel‐group, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Doubt over the cost-effectiveness of the cholinesterase inhibitors in dementia has renewed interest in alternative treatments such as Ginkgo biloba. We aimed to determine the effectiveness and the safety profile of Ginkgo biloba for treating early stage dementia in a community setting. METHODS: We conducted a community-based, pragmatic, randomised, double-blind, parallel-group trial where participants were given a standardised extract of Ginkgo biloba (120 mg daily) or a placebo control for 6 months. Our primary outcomes were cognitive functioning (ADAS-Cog) and participant and carer-rated quality of life (QOL-AD). RESULTS: We recruited 176 participants, mainly through general practices. In the ANCOVA model with baseline score as a co-variate (n = 176), Ginkgo did not have a significant effect on outcome at six months on either the ADAS-Cog score (p = 0.392), the participant-rated QOL-AD score (p = 0.787) nor the carer-rated QOL-AD score (p = 0.222). CONCLUSION: We found no evidence that a standard dose of high purity Ginkgo biloba confers benefit in mild-moderate dementia over 6 months.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".