Inclusion and exclusion criteria
We included studies in any language that met the following criteria: 
1.the participants all had dementia, or those with dementia were analysed separately;
2.the study evaluated non-pharmacological interventions for agitation, defined as inappropriate verbal, vocal or motor activity not judged by an outside observer to be an outcome of need,18 encompassing physical and verbal aggression and wandering;
3.agitation was measured quantitatively;
4.a comparator group was reported or agitation was compared before and after the intervention.
We excluded studies if every individual was given psychotropic drugs or some participants received medication as the sole intervention. In this paper we report the highest-quality studies - randomised controlled trials (RCTs) with more than 45 participants - since none of the trials with a smaller sample size provided a full and appropriate sample size calculation.