Whalley 2012.

Study characteristics
Methods	Design: retrospective cohort Setting: community Country: UK Duration of follow‐up: 6.25 years Covariates controlled for: age and childhood IQ for linear regression; age, sex, family history of dementia, education, heart history, blood pressure history, ApoE e4 for logistic regression
Participants	Participants numbers: 281 Population type: older adults Sex: 42% women (119) Age (mean): 77 years
Prognostic factors	Anticholinergic burden measurement method: literature review of drugs' mean anticholinergic activity
Outcomes	Outcomes assessed: dementia; cognitive decline Outcome ascertainment dementia: consensus diagnosis based on multidisciplinary evaluation Outcome ascertainment cognitive decline: MMSE and cognitive test battery of 5 cognitive tests Diagnostic criteria dementia: ICD‐10 criteria Diagnostic criteria cognitive decline: scores on cognitive testing
Source of funding	Wellcome Trust
Notes
Item	Authors' judgement	Support for judgement
Study participation	Unclear	Adequate reporting of age, sex, and comorbidities. However, limited age range included (77–82 years).
Study attrition	No	281/324 participated. Only 136/281 (48%) participants had complete cognitive data sets available after follow‐up.
Prognostic factor measurement	Unclear	Relied on patient self‐report.
Outcome measurement	Unclear	No blinding but anticholinergic burden score likely applied in retrospect.
Study confounding	Unclear	No control for depression.
Reverse causation	Unclear	Excluded people with lower MMSE at baseline from analysis. Follow‐up 15 months minimum after baseline anticholinergic measurement taken.
Statistical analysis and reporting	No	Model was underpowered to assess dementia association (only 45 cases of dementia included in model yet 9 covariates).