Meta-Analysis of Transcranial Stimulation Efficacy for Alzheimer's Disease

A systematic review and meta-analysis published in April 2026, aggregating results from 23 randomized controlled trials involving 823 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. The study, authored by Xin Wang and shared under a CC-BY-4.0 license, evaluates the therapeutic effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on cognitive domains. It reports pooled effect sizes for global cognition, memory, executive function, language, and emotion.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking tDCS treatment effects based on reported standardized mean differences for global cognition.
• Investigating the influence of session count on outcomes based on subgroup analyses for memory and executive function.
• Analyzing the role of patient education level on treatment response based on subgroup results for memory and executive function.
• Studying the impact of stimulation site on executive function based on findings related to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Strengths

• Includes data from 23 randomized controlled trials, a substantial number for a meta-analysis in this niche.
• Reports specific effect sizes (e.g., SMD=0.66 for global cognition) with confidence intervals and p-values.
• Conducts detailed subgroup analyses based on session count, education level, and stimulation site.

Limitations

• The dataset is a single 75.6 KB PDF document; the underlying raw trial data is not provided.
• The authors note relatively high heterogeneity among the included studies, which may affect generalizability.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred from the published text.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Xin Wang.

Collection Method

Systematic literature search in PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library up to April 2025.

Time Range

Literature search covered studies up to April 2025; analysis published in 2026.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-10 05:59:06.

Geography

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