28,180 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
General baseline characteristics of the study population were mean (standard deviation) age, 58.1 (8.8) years; 47% women. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,087 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Visually impaired individuals were more likely to develop incident dementia, with a progressively greater risk among those with worse visual acuity. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 117,187 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
More than 25% of the U.S. population aged ≥ 65 years has diabetes mellitus (hereafter referred to as diabetes),1 and the aging of the overall population is a significant driver of the diabetes epidemic. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,000 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
One hundred twenty-eight participants (21.9%) developed dementia over a median of 7.1 years. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 584 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Compared with abstention, consumption of 1 to 6 drinks weekly is associated with a lower risk of incident dementia among older adults. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 5,888 Evidence: moderate
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In this study, lower AD signature region volumes, brain microhemorrhages, higher WMH volumes, and infarcts were risk factors associated with dementia in older community-based residents. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,553 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We tested whether dysregulation of cholesterol catabolism, through its conversion to primary bile acids (BAs), was associated with dementia pathogenesis. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 141 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Neurodegeneration rather than cerebrovascular lesions may play a key role in T2DM-related cognitive impairment. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 350 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In an older cohort with low cerebrovascular disease burden, T2DM contributes to cognitive decline via neurodegeneration. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 124 Evidence: moderate
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Vascular health had quantifiably greater impact on neurodegeneration in AD regions than on amyloid deposition. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 430 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
More-severe diabetes (defined by higher HbA 1c and longer disease duration) but not prediabetes or less-severe diabetes was associated with smaller brain volumes and an increased burden of brain vascular pathology. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,713 Evidence: low
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Patients with AD have altered microvascular network in the retina (narrower retinal venules and a sparser and more tortuous retinal vessels) compared with matched nondemented controls. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 136 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
T2DM may promote neurodegeneration independent of AD dementia diagnosis, and its effect may be driven by tau phosphorylation. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 816 Evidence: low
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High WMH was a predictor of progression from normal to MCI (adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 3.30; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.33-8.17; P= .01) but not conversion from MCI to all-cause dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 67 Evidence: moderate
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During a mean follow-up of 12.1 years, 1,520 individuals developed dementia, 1,194 of whom had AD. 4 key findings →
Participants: 12,305 Evidence: low
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-statistics 0.82-0.83). We found a significant association between all-cause dementia and multimarker CSVD scores, which was independent of the FSRP as well as its individual components. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,152 Evidence: moderate
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Circulating leptin was associated with a reduced incidence of dementia and AD and with cerebral brain volume in asymptomatic older adults. 4 key findings →
Participants: 785 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Plasma A beta levels are affected by age and by systemic and CNS vascular risk factors. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 55 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This risk was not mediated by smaller hippocampal or amygdalar volumes. 2 key findings →
Participants: 503 Evidence: low
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Hypertension is one of the main risk factors for vascular dementia and Alzheimer disease. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 37 Evidence: moderate
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Type 2 diabetes is associated with hippocampal and amygdalar atrophy, regardless of vascular pathology. 4 key findings →
Participants: 506 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Vascular disease in the brain is prevalent among incident dementia cases. 1 key finding →
Participants: 3,375 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
APOEε4 is the most well-established genetic risk factor for sporadic Alzheimer's disease and is associated with cerebral amyloid-β. 4 key findings →
Participants: 211 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Previous studies have explored the associations of retinal vessel calibre, measured from retinal photographs or fundus images using semi-automated computer programs, with cognitive impairment and dementia, supporting the concept that retinal blood vessels reflect microvascular changes in the brain. 3 key findings →
Participants: 212 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Whereas traumatic brain injury (TBI) results in widespread disruption of neural networks, changes in regional resting-state functional connectivity patterns after insult remain unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 13 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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 28,180 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 28,180 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.7% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.1%), 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.
1,034 records (3.7% 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 →