Table 1.
Patient characteristics (n = 41,456).
Fig 1.
Contribution of drugs with an ACB score of 1, 2 or 3 to the cumulative ACB score of the entire study population.
54,211 anticholinergics were used with a cumulative ACB score of 76,934. X-axis groups of patients having individual ACB scores of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or ≥ 7. Y-axis Cumulative ACB scores achieved in each group of patients and overview of ACB scoring points originating from drugs with ACB scores of 1,2 or 3, respectively.
Fig 2.
Most commonly used definite anticholinergic drugs (i.e. ACB score 2 or 3) among the total study population.
Left y-axis Absolute number of drugs with definite anticholinergic properties received by patients. Right y-axis Proportion of the respective drug of all definite anticholinergics according to the ACB scale.
Table 2.
Multivariable analysis of factors associated with cognitive impairment.
Fig 3.
Cognitive impairment measured by the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and mean anticholinergic cognitive burden in patients of the GiB-DAT database.
A MMSE score of 0–17 indicates severe, 18–24 moderate and 25–30 no cognitive impairment. Error bar 95% confidence interval, *** p < 0.001 for overall and all pairwise comparisons.
Fig 4.
Cognitive impairment measured by the item dementia of the 4D+S scale and mean anticholinergic cognitive burden in patients of the GiB-DAT database.
Error bar 95% confidence interval, *** p < 0.0001 for overall and pairwise comparisons except for the difference between moderate and severe dementia was borderline significance (p = 0.043).