Improvement in behavioural symptoms in patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease by memantine: a pooled data analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Behavioural disturbances are a common and distressing aspect of Alzheimer's disease (AD). This pooled analysis evaluated the specific benefits of memantine on behavioural disturbances in patients with moderate to severe AD. METHODS: Data were pooled from six 24/28-week, randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind studies. Of the 2,311 patients included in these studies, 1,826 patients with moderate to severe AD (MMSE <20) were included in this analysis, corresponding to the extended indication for memantine in Europe. In this subgroup, 959 patients received memantine 20 mg/day and 867 received placebo. Behavioural symptoms were rated using the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) total and single-item scores at weeks 12 and 24/28. RESULTS: At weeks 12 and 24/28, ITT analysis demonstrated that memantine treatment produced statistically significant benefits over placebo treatment in NPI total score (p=0.001 and p=0.008), and in NPI single items: delusions (p=0.007 week 12, p=0.001 week 24/28), hallucinations (p=0.037 week 12), agitation/aggression (p=0.001 week 12, p=0.001 week 24/28), and irritability/lability (p=0.005 week 24/28), LOCF population. Analysis of the patients without symptoms at baseline indicated reduced emergence of agitation/aggression (p=0.002), delusions (p=0.047), and disinhibition (p=0.011), at week 12, and of agitation/aggression (p=0.002), irritability/lability (p=0.004), and night-time behaviour (p=0.050) at week 24/28 in those receiving memantine. OC analyses yielded similar results. CONCLUSIONS: The data suggest that memantine is effective in treating and preventing the behavioural symptoms of moderate to severe AD. Specific persistent benefits were observed on the symptoms of delusions and agitation/aggression, which are known to be associated with rapid disease progression, increased caregiver burden, early institutionalisation, and increased costs of care.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.025 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.015 | 0.033 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".