Get help now — free helplines

You can call any of these for free. You do not need a diagnosis, an appointment, or a crisis to call — questions and plain exhaustion are reasons enough.

  • Alzheimer's Association 24/7 Helpline 800-272-3900 24 hours a day, 365 days a year Free, confidential support and information for people with dementia, caregivers, families and the public. Master's-level clinicians. Also Spanish.
  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 988 24/7 Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. For anyone in emotional distress or a mental-health crisis, including caregivers.
  • Alzheimer's Foundation of America (AFA) Helpline 866-232-8484 9:00 am - 9:00 pm ET, seven days a week Licensed social workers providing support, info and referrals. Also text message and web chat. Text: 646-586-5283

In a medical emergency, call 911. More numbers, and what each line does, on the help page.

Find studies

A note on reading research. One study is rarely the final word.

We try to note the size of a study, whether it was in humans or animals, and how early-stage the finding is. If a summary here doesn't make that clear, treat it with extra caution and check the original source.

Early specialist PC exposure reduced the risk of hospital-based acute care in the last 30 days of life for all chronic disease groups except dementia. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 169 Evidence: moderate

Association of incident dementia with hospitalizations

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2012-01-01

Four hundred ninety-four individuals eventually developed dementia and 427 (86%) of these persons were admitted at least once; 2525 remained free of dementia and 1478 (59%) of those were admitted at least once. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 3,019 Evidence: moderate

Association between acute care and critical illness hospitalization and cognitive function in older adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2010-02-01

During a mean (SD) follow-up of 6.1 (3.2) years, 1601 participants had no hospitalization, 1287 had 1 or more noncritical illness hospitalizations, and 41 had 1 or more critical illness hospitalizations. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 2,929 Evidence: moderate

Home based support for caregivers of persons with dementia, which emphasizes the use of locally available, low-cost human resources, is feasible, acceptable and leads to significant improvements in caregiver mental health and burden of caring. 3 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high

Studies of automobile accident frequency among drivers with AD have yielded conflicting results about the risk of accidents. 2 key findings →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

Estimating prognosis for nursing home residents with advanced dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2004-06-01

A risk score based on 12 variables from the MDS estimates 6-month mortality for nursing home residents with advanced dementia with greater accuracy than existing prognostic guidelines. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 6,799 Evidence: moderate

Surgical repair of a hip fracture was associated with lower mortality among NH residents with advanced dementia and should be considered together with the residents' goals of care in management decisions. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 2,441 Evidence: moderate

ED attendance in the last year of life for people with dementia is common and is increasing. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 4,867 Evidence: moderate

This review highlights the complexities of pain in NH residents and has implications for both clinical practice and future research. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

The final cohort included 27 243 nursing home residents with advanced dementia (19 363 [71.1%] women) who died between June 1, 2010, and March 31, 2015, at the median (interquartile range) age of 88 (83-92) years. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 27 Evidence: moderate

Medicare beneficiaries with a diagnosis of dementia receiving postacute care in HH or SNF experienced similar rates of readmission and mortality across settings. 2 key findings →

Design: retrospective cohort Participants: 977,946 Evidence: moderate

This review confirms that clinically significant NPSs are common in NH patients with dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,458 Evidence: moderate

Increasing comorbidity and health services utilization in older adults with prior stroke

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. Neurology 2016-10-19

Our findings demonstrate the importance of community-based patient-centered care strategies for stroke survivors that address their range of health needs and prevent more costly acute care use. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 29,673 Evidence: moderate

In our final study sample (N = 21,558), significant difference in survival among index AD medication groups were observed with donepezil being associated with better survival than memantine, and oral and transdermal forms of rivastigmine for both ITT and as-treated analysis. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 21,558 Evidence: moderate

Effects of the NYU caregiver intervention-adult child on residential care placement

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. The Gerontologist 2013-01-20

Two thirds (66%) of adult child caregivers in the control condition admitted their parent to a residential care setting compared with 37% in the treatment condition. 3 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high

20% of individuals with newly identified dementia were homebound and this group was more functionally impaired, medically complex, and socioeconomically disadvantaged as compared to the non-homebound. 5 key findings →

Design: prospective cohort Participants: 939 Evidence: moderate

US clinical practice guidelines for the diagnostic evaluation of cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) or AD and related dementias (ADRD) are decades old and aimed at specialists. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic-review Evidence: high

Use of donepezil by AD patients resulted in significant delays in NHP. 2 key findings →

Design: open-label trial Participants: 1,115 Evidence: high

Existing studies have included a narrow range of infectious diseases, relied on short follow-up periods, and provided little evidence for whether the increased risk is limited to specific dementia subtypes or attributable to specific microbes rather than infection burden. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 490 Evidence: moderate

Dementia diagnosis recording in general hospitals is increasing but remains less likely in some groups. 1 key finding →

Design: cohort study Participants: 21,387 Evidence: moderate

Our findings suggest that clinicians should consider sedative-associated, hypoxic, and septic delirium, which often co-occur, as distinct indicators of acute brain injury and seek to identify all potential risk factors that may impact on long-term cognitive impairment, especially those that are iatrogenic and potentially modifiable such as sedation. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,048 Evidence: moderate

Residents enrolled in managed care (n = 133) were more likely to have do-not-hospitalize orders compared with those in traditional Medicare fee for service (n = 158) (63.7% vs 50.9%; adjusted odds ratio, 1.9; 95% CI, 1.1-3.4), were less likely to be transferred to the hospital for acute illness (3.8% vs 15.7%; adjusted odds ratio, 0.2; 95% CI, 0.1-0.5), had more primary care visits per 90 days (mean [SD], 4.8 [2.6] vs 4.2 [5.0]; adjusted rate ratio, 1.3; 95% CI, 1.1-1.6), and had more nurse practitioner visits (3.0 [2.1] vs 0.8 [2.6]; adjusted rate ratio, 3.0; 95% CI, 2.2-4.1). 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 133 Evidence: moderate

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Where “Free full text” comes from

Free full text links and the Full text may need a subscription label come from Unpaywall, Europe PMC and OpenAlex records of free copies, checked 10 Oct 2026. A study with neither is unknown, not paywalled. Show only studies that are free to read

How the 0–100 score works — and why some entries are capped

This is alzhub's own score. It is not an official metric, not an impact factor, and no journal, publisher or ranking body endorses it. We built it so that a reader who is not a scientist can tell a landmark trial from a conference abstract without having to already know the difference. Every point comes from one of 20 components, all of them printed on the study itself, so you can disagree with our arithmetic rather than having to trust the total.

  • Journal tier up to 10 pts
  • Journal's citation record up to 4 pts
  • Study design up to 12 pts
  • Strength of evidence up to 5 pts
  • Peer-review validation up to 10 pts
  • How recent up to 5 pts
  • Sample size up to 4 pts
  • Effect reported up to 3 pts
  • Studied in people up to 3 pts
  • Randomized / blinded up to 2 pts
  • Times cited up to 7 pts
  • Citations per year up to 5 pts
  • Impact for its field and year up to 6 pts
  • Cited by studies here up to 6 pts
  • Still being cited up to 4 pts
  • Senior author's track record up to 4 pts
  • Institution's track record up to 3 pts
  • Multicenter collaboration up to 3 pts
  • Indexed in PubMed up to 2 pts
  • Free to read up to 2 pts

Journals are placed in ordered tiers, never given a numeric impact factor — we could not verify current impact factors from a source we control, and an invented one would be worse than none. Tier 1 is the top-tier general journals (NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA, Nature, Science, Nature Medicine); tier 2 is the leading specialty journals; tier 3 is every other peer-reviewed journal. A separate part scores how much the journal's own papers are cited, which tells the tier-3 journals apart.

Two rules we don't bend. First, we never fill in a missing value: if a record does not state a sample size or a design, that component scores zero, and if we simply have no data for a part, such as a citation count, that part is left out and the study is scored on the parts we could check. The study card says which. Second, anything that is not a peer-reviewed article is capped at 16/100 and carries a warning chip — so a conference abstract or a company press release can never outrank a peer-reviewed paper, no matter how good it looks.

We rank a rigorous null result — a good trial showing that something does not work — above an early positive finding. Someone deciding whether to buy a supplement is served by that, and the rigour is already counted by the design and journal components.

The score is computed from the published data alone and is reproducible: the same file always yields the same numbers.

See the whole rubric drawn out → — four charts covering all 31,380 studies: how the scores are spread and where the cap bites, which of the 20 components the library is strong and weak on, which subjects rest on stronger evidence, and what kinds of study each subject is actually built from.

What this library is — and isn't

This is a large sample of the Alzheimer's literature, not an exhaustive index of it. It holds 31,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (65.6% of the library) and OpenAlex (16.2%), plus smaller pulls from PubMed, Crossref and medRxiv. If a study, a drug, or a finding isn't here, that is not evidence it doesn't exist in the literature — it may simply not have been pulled in yet.

1,048 records (3.3% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 973 of those are preprints posted before any journal review, and the rest are conference abstracts, regulatory notices and reports. Every study card on this page states its status plainly, and the score above is capped for anything that isn't a peer-reviewed article.

See the full, machine-readable breakdown of this library's coverage →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed    Where this research is being discussed: events