Fig. 1

MMSE change in groups with or without herbal medicine. a Patients with Alzheimer’s disease had a transient improvement in cognitive function with conventional therapy (CT), but declined to a level similar to no treatment after 18 months. CT supplemented with herbal medicine (CT + H) provided additional benefit. The effect from herbal medicines became more pronounced over time. Expected decline of MMSE were calculated by formula produced from previous data. b In subgroup analysis, patients with moderate AD (red lines) were initially more responsive to both CT + H and CT therapies than mild AD (blue lines) patients. Over the course of treatment, CT + H outperformed CT therapy, a substantial deceleration in cognitive decline being observed in patients with moderate AD, while a long-term stabilization effect being observed in the patients with mild AD. MMSE denotes mini-mental state examination