Navigating Agitation Associated with Dementia Due to Alzheimer's Disease: Multidisciplinary Strategies and Practical Treatment Considerations

Agitation eventually affects nearly every patient with Alzheimer's disease, yet it rarely looks like simple aggression. The panel outlines how common it is, the many forms it takes, and why it so often goes unrecognized.

Distinguishing agitation from depression, anxiety, and psychosis shapes everything that follows in treatment. The panel walks through the clinical differences and where formal screening scales genuinely fit into daily practice.

Agitation does not stay contained to the patient. The panel examines the data linking agitation to caregiver burden, and the communication gaps that complicate coordinating care across specialties.

Before any prescription is written, non-pharmacologic strategies and a structured framework guide the panel's approach to agitation, alongside a biological explanation for why redirection so often fails.

Decades of off-label prescribing for agitation associated with dementia due to Alzheimer’s are colliding with new evidence and new regulation. The panel examines why practice has lagged behind the data, and what is now changing.

Two on-label options are not enough for every patient. The panel weighs the field's remaining unmet needs against the biological rationale behind a newer, non-antipsychotic approach to treatment.