Agitation, low mood, apathy, suspicion and poor sleep are common in dementia. Published guidance starts with looking for the cause. Press play to follow one behaviour through the DICE approach.
Illustration of a published clinical-reasoning approach. No large trial has tested DICE itself.
Antipsychotics: the risk in 1,000 people
Antipsychotic medicines carry a boxed warning for older people with dementia. The figures below come from the class wording in current US labels, a meta-analysis, and a large study of US veterans.
Each dot is one person. Large filled dots are deaths. Rates from label class wording; counts per 1,000 are arithmetic from those rates.
The other published options and their evidence
What trials and regulators found for the other medicines studied for these symptoms. This is a summary of evidence, not a treatment plan. The only dose mentioned is a published caveat about one trial.