In the ongoing effort to discover treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), there has been considerable focus on investigating the use of repurposed drug candidates. Mining of electronic health record data has the potential to identify novel correlated effects between commonly used drugs and AD. In this study, claims from members with commercial health insurance coverage were analyzed to determine the correlation between the use of various drugs on AD incidence and claim frequency. We found that, within the insured population, several medications for psychotic and mental illnesses were associated with higher disease incidence and frequency, while, to a lesser extent, antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs were associated with lower AD incidence rates. The observations thus provide a general overview of the prescription and claim relationships between various drug types and Alzheimer’s disease, with insights into which drugs have possible implications on resulting AD diagnosis.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13195-023-01255-0.