Yearly Medicare wellness visits and dementia medicine: what a big study found
☕ Includes a question for the family ↓
Alzheimer's and dementiaPart of a story we are following · 4 articles · See every update
If an older person in your family is on Medicare, there is a free yearly check-up that includes a look at memory and thinking. A large new study of people with dementia found that those who had more of these visits were more likely to start a medicine that helps manage symptoms.
These medicines do not stop the disease. They can help with symptoms for some people. The useful part is what the visits seem to open up: a conversation about care and about planning ahead.
How the study worked
Researchers looked at Medicare records for a very large group of people diagnosed with Alzheimer disease or a related dementia in 2018. None had taken a dementia medicine before. The average age was 82.3 years, and 64.5% were women. The team counted how many annual wellness visits each person had in the 3 years before, then checked who started a dementia medicine in the following year. It was a look back at existing records, so it shows a link, not proof that the visits caused the prescriptions. It was published Oct. 1, 2026, in JAMA Network Open.
What they found
Most people, 60.8%, had no wellness visits in those 3 years. About 19% had one visit, about 13% had two, and about 7% had three or more. The exact figures were 19.2%, 12.9% and 7.2%.
Overall, new prescriptions were not common. Depending on the number of visits, between 9.8% and 14.1% of people started a dementia medicine.
The more visits a person had, the more likely they were to start one. After the researchers adjusted for differences between the groups, the rate of new prescriptions was higher by:
That is 9.0% higher with one visit, 12.0% higher with two visits, and 16.0% higher with three or more visits, compared with people who had none.
The link was stronger for people whose dementia was newly diagnosed. For them, the visits seemed to matter even more.
What are dementia medicines?
The study looked at four drugs: memantine, donepezil, rivastigmine and galantamine. Doctors use them to help manage symptoms such as problems with memory and thinking. They are one part of dementia care. Planning for future living arrangements and daily support is another part, and the authors say the wellness visit can help with both.
What you can do today
If you or someone you love has Medicare, call the doctor’s office and book the annual wellness visit. Medicare Part B covers it, and you can ask for it by that name. At the visit, mention any changes in memory or thinking, such as repeated questions, missed bills or getting lost on familiar roads. If you do not know when the last visit was, the office or your Medicare.gov account can tell you.
Talk about it at home
Doctors and researchers can look at a big pile of health records the way you might look at a giant box of puzzle pieces. By sorting the pieces, they can notice patterns, like which people had more check-up visits and which ones later started a certain kind of medicine. In this study, people who had more yearly check-ups were a little more likely to start a medicine that helps with memory and thinking. But the records only show that two things go together, not that one made the other happen.
Question for the table
Why do you think the scientists sorted people into groups by how many visits they had, and what other differences between the groups might they have needed to think about?
Keep exploring
Copies this article and its questions so you can paste them into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or the AI you use, and keep the conversation going.
Questions and answers
- What is a Medicare annual wellness visit?
- It is a yearly Medicare check-up focused on prevention. It includes a review of memory and thinking.
- Do dementia medicines stop the disease?
- No. They can help manage symptoms for some people, but they do not stop dementia.
- How many people in the study had these visits?
- Most did not. About 60.8% had no wellness visits in the 3 years before.
- Did the visits cause the prescriptions?
- The study shows a link, not proof of cause. It looked back at Medicare records.
