Caregiver-Reported Behavioral Changes After Donepezil Transdermal Patch Therapy in Alzheimer’s Disease: An Exploratory Real-World Network Analysis

Purpose

To characterize caregiver-reported behavioral changes after donepezil transdermal patch therapy and to examine the descriptive connectivity of co-occurring improvements in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Patients and Methods: This retrospective, single-center observational study included 26 patients meeting the 2011 National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s Association criteria for probable AD dementia. Approximately 2– 4 months after patch initiation, caregivers rated nine behavioral domains using routine, non-validated single-item change assessments as improved, unchanged, or worsened relative to the pre-treatment state. A descriptive co-improvement network was used solely to summarize pairwise co-occurrence of binary improvement indicators using phi-coefficients and observed strength centrality. Because of the small sample and sparse binary events, all network measures were treated as sample-specific descriptive quantities rather than inferential estimates.