28,580 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
There is consistent evidence supporting an association between AF and increased incidence of dementia in patients with stroke whereas there remains considerable uncertainty about any link in the broader population. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 46,637 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Presence and severity of WMH are associated with substantially increased risk of dementia, functional impairment, stroke recurrence, and mortality after ischemic stroke. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 104 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
AF is independently associated with increased risk of dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 77,668 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
WMH were associated with increased risk of cognitive dysfunction and could become a neuroimaging indicator of dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 19,040 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
White matter hyperintensities are associated with an increased risk of all-dementia and Alzheimer's disease in the general population. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,913 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Hypertension significantly increases the risk of vascular dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 768 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We identified 24 relevant studies of 7575 patients, including 2860 with lacunar stroke; 24% had MCI or dementia post stroke. 3 key findings →
Participants: 6,478 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This study found that long-term exposure to air pollution was associated with a higher risk of dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 4,590 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Our data show that elderly patients with DM without dementia have accelerated progression of brain atrophy with significant consequences in cognition compared to subjects without DM. 5 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 89 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Statin users were less likely to have incident dementia/cognitive impairment without dementia during a 5-year follow-up. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,674 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Our study found that midlife stage 1 and stage 2 systolic hypertension is associated with increased risk of AD by 18 and 25%, respectively, although no association was found for diastolic hypertension. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Vascular dementia (VD) is a neurocognitive disorder whose precise definition is still up for debate. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Hypertension after age 65 years is not associated with AD and does not adversely affect memory, language, or general cognitive function. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,259 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Depression is an accepted risk factor for dementia, but it is unclear if this relationship is causal. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 388 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Among 11 601 participants (mean [SD] age, 59.18 [9.41] years; 5569 male [48.0%]), 9145 (78.8%) were exposed to at least 1 ACE indicator, 4241 (36.6%) to at least 1 AAE indicator, and 3531 (30.4%) to both ACE and AAE markers. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 601 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
During 3697 person-years of follow-up (mean per person, 3.6 years), dementia developed in 30 of the 1015 participants. 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,015 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Incident AF was associated with an increased risk of dementia, independent of clinical stroke in an elderly population. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 435 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Diabetes mellitus did not increase the risk of incident AD in the Framingham cohort overall; however, DM may be a risk factor for AD in the absence of other known major AD risk factors. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,210 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The effect of stroke on dementia incidence in the population is not explained by common risk factors. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is a major cause of stroke and dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The direct visualization of retinal vessels provides a unique opportunity to study cerebral small vessel disease, because these vessels share many features. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 490 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We investigated the nature of the relationship between depression and vascular diseases by reviewing epidemiological, clinical, neuroimaging and neuropathology studies which have reported on the relationship of depression to coronary artery disease, stroke disease, alterations in blood pressure, vascular dementia, diabetes mellitus and cholesterol levels and by reviewing potential mechanisms by which depression could be associated with vascular diseases. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Atherosclerosis of the intracranial arteries is an independent and important risk factor for dementia, suggesting potentially reversible pathways unrelated to Alzheimer pathology and stroke through which vascular changes may influence dementia risk. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 200 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
It is associated with metabolic syndrome, incident diabetes, carotid atherosclerosis, and endothelial dysfunction, conditions that in turn are strongly linked with brain damage and cognitive impairment. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 766 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
People with raised systolic blood pressure (≥160 mm Hg) or high serum cholesterol concentration (≥6.5 mmol/l) in midlife had a significantly higher risk of Alzheimer's disease in later life, even after adjustment for age, body mass index, education, vascular events, smoking status, and alcohol consumption, than those with normal systolic blood pressure (odds ratio 2.3, 95% confidence interval 1.0 to 5.5) or serum cholesterol (odds ratio 2.1, 1.0 to 4.4). 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,449 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 28,580 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 28,580 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (62.2% of the library) and OpenAlex (17.8%), 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 (3.6% 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 →