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.

There is a lack of midlife specific data, limited data on VaD, and a lack of geographical representation for many risk factors for dementia. 1 key finding →

Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high

Adults who engage in leisure time aerobic and muscle strengthening activities at levels recommended by the 2018 physical activity guidelines for Americans show greatly reduced risk of all cause and cause specific mortality. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 268 Evidence: moderate

Low physical activity is associated with a higher risk for dementia in older individuals, suggesting that a reduced risk of dementia and higher brain volumes may be additional health benefits of maintaining physical activity into old age. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 3,714 Evidence: moderate

Screening for IC impairments identifies older adults at higher risk of incident frailty and incident IADL/ADL disability. 3 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 759 Evidence: moderate

An emerging body of evidence has raised concern regarding the potentially harmful effects of inhaled pollutants on the central nervous system during the last decade. 2 key findings →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

In this cohort study, higher residential PM2.5 levels, especially from agriculture and wildfires, were associated with higher rates of incident dementia, providing further evidence supporting PM2.5 reduction as a population-based approach to promote healthy cognitive aging. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 27 Evidence: moderate

Road traffic noise, air pollution, and risk of dementia - results from the Betula project

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 69 out of 100. Environmental research 2018-06-14

We found no evidence that exposure to road traffic noise, either independently or in combination with traffic air pollution, was associated with risk of dementia in our study area. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,721 Evidence: moderate

Epidemiological evidence reveals that patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) have an increased risk of neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), including dementia and Parkinson's disease (PD). 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 4,651 Evidence: moderate

The prevalence and incidence of early-onset dementia among adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is currently unknown. 5 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 12,648 Evidence: moderate

Midlife insomnia (fully adjusted hazard ratio = 1.24, 95% confidence interval = 1.02-1.50) and late-life terminal insomnia (fully adjusted odds ratio = 1.94, 95% confidence interval = 1.08-3.49) were associated with a higher dementia risk. 3 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,446 Evidence: moderate

Buse, MD PhDDiabetes Center, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, North Carolina (J.B.B.), and the LEADER Publication Committee on behalf of the LEADER Trial Investigators*Author, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/M18-1569 SectionsSupplemental MaterialAboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail Background: Comorbidities and complications associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) increase with age, making treatment of elderly persons with this condition challenging. 1 key finding →

Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high

Incidence of Dementia over Three Decades in the Framingham Heart Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100. New England Journal of Medicine 2016

This long-running Massachusetts study tracked dementia rates over more than 30 years and found that a given person's chance of developing dementia at a given age has been steadily falling since the late 1970s. The decline was seen mainly in people with at least a high school education. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 5,205 Evidence: high

Obesity in middle age and future risk of dementia: a 27 year longitudinal population based study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100. BMJ 2005-06-09

Tracking over 10,000 people for 27 years, this landmark study found that being obese in midlife (in your 40s) nearly doubled the risk of developing dementia decades later, and being overweight also raised the risk, independent of whether someone later developed diabetes or heart disease. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 10,276 Evidence: high

Traumatic brain injury and risk of dementia in older veterans

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100. Neurology 2014-07-22

In a study of nearly 190,000 older US military veterans, those who had experienced a traumatic brain injury were about 57% more likely to develop dementia over the next 9 years than veterans without a brain injury history. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 188,764 Evidence: high

These findings provide evidence for a relationship between all types of alcohol use and increased dementia risk. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 559,559 Evidence: moderate

Kidney Function, Alzheimer Disease Blood Biomarkers, and Dementia Risk in Community-Dwelling Older Adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100. Neurology 2025-12-03

At baseline, 2,279 dementia-free participants with available blood samples were included (median age 72 (interquartile range, 61-81) years; 62% female). 4 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 2,279 Evidence: moderate

From across this tag

10 of the 3,281 studies in this tag, picked by a fixed rule (a hash of each study's address), not by score or date; each page of this list shows a different 10. The same 10 appear here every time.

↑ Change the filters

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
  • Randomised / 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
  • Multi-centre 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 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.

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 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed