27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Risk for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD), the most prevalent dementia, is partially driven by genetics. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 94,437 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Hearing loss is one of the top contributors to years lived with disability and is a risk factor for dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 723,266 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Decades of research have revealed numerous risk factors for mental disorders beyond genetics, but their consistency and magnitude remain uncer-tain. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 176 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Frontotemporal lobar degeneration with neuronal inclusions of the TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (FTLD-TDP) is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder with only a limited number of risk loci identified. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 985 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Age-related hearing loss is linked to loneliness and poorer cognitive health, but it remains unclear whether loneliness helps explain associations between hearing difficulties and cognitive performance or dementia, and whether these patterns reflect causal pathways or shared underlying liability. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 10,375 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Evidence on the association between air pollution and dementia is accumulating but still inconclusive, and the potential effect modification by genetics is unclear. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 227,840 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The eMERGE (electronic MEdical Records and GEnomics) Network is an NHGRI-supported consortium of five institutions to explore the utility of DNA repositories coupled to Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems for advancing discovery in genome science. eMERGE also includes a special emphasis on the ethical, legal and social issues related to these endeavors. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is the second most common cause of presenile dementia. 1 key finding →
Participants: 515 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Mutations in the glucocerebrosidase gene (GBA) are associated with Gaucher's disease, the most common lysosomal storage disorder. 5 key findings →
Participants: 790 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Obesity and Area Deprivation Index, a measure of socioeconomic status, were significantly associated with elevated AD risk within the hypertensive cohort. 4 key findings →
Design: retrospective cohort Participants: 1,862 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Both the magnitude and the extent of brain activation during memory-activation tasks in regions affected by Alzheimer's disease, including the left hippocampal, parietal, and prefrontal regions, were greater among the carriers of the APOE epsilon4 allele than among the carriers of the APOE epsilon3 allele. 1 key finding →
Participants: 30 Evidence: low
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Our results suggest that the TREM2 p.R47H substitution is a risk factor for frontotemporal dementia and Parkinson's disease in addition to Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →
Participants: 609 Evidence: low
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Human apolipoprotein E has three isoforms: APOE2, APOE3 and APOE4. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
During a median of 10.8 years follow-up, sleeping more or fewer than 7 hours was associated with a higher dementia risk (hazard ratio [HR] for 5 vs 7 hours: 1.35, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.11-1.64; HR for 9 vs 7 hours: 1.59; 95% CI 1.37-1.85) as was daytime napping (HR for often/all of the time vs never/rarely: 1.67; 95% CI 1.37-2.03). 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Poor speech-in-noise hearing (>-5.5-dB speech reception threshold; prevalence 14%) was associated with lower cognitive scores (ß = -1.28; 95% confidence interval [CI] -1.54 to -1.03). 5 key findings →
Participants: 80,074 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Individuals with autosomal dominant frontotemporal dementia (FTD) exhibit considerable variability in disease onset and progression. 5 key findings →
Participants: 711 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
APOE4 is the strongest genetic risk factor associated with late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD). 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The ε4 allele of the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE4) is a strong genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and several other neurodegenerative conditions, including Lewy body dementia (LBD). 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The observed relation between high triglycerides, diabetes, and vascular dementia emphasizes the need for detection and treatment of vascular risk factors in older individuals in order to prevent the likelihood of clinical dementia. 3 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In late middle age, cognitively normal subjects who are homozygous for the epsilon 4 allele for apolipoprotein E have reduced glucose metabolism in the same regions of the brain as in patients with probable Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) keeps neurotoxic plasma-derived components, cells, and pathogens out of the brain. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL) has been recently reported as a cause of stroke. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Around 40% of dementia risk is attributable to modifiable risk factors such as physical inactivity, hypertension, diabetes and obesity. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A prospective analysis of risk factors for Alzheimer's disease was a major objective of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging, a nationwide, population-based study. 3 key findings →
Participants: 194 Evidence: low
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Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have elevations of fasting plasma insulin that are hypothesized to be associated with disrupted brain insulin metabolism. 2 key findings →
Participants: 25 Evidence: low
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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
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.
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 27,380 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.
This is a large sample of the Alzheimer's literature, not an exhaustive index of it. It holds 27,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (60.6% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.6%), 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.
1,032 records (3.8% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 962 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 →