This meta-analysis provides evidence that poor gait performance predicts dementia. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Research
31,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The Five Lives assessment demonstrates high usability and reliability among older adults. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 756 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
69/100
Cardiovascular (CV)- and lifestyle-associated risk factors (RFs) are increasingly recognized as important for Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Over the past two decades, resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) methods have provided new insights into the network organization of the human brain. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Diabetic patients with severe diabetic retinal disease have an increased risk of dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 29,961 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Overall, exercise training beneficially affects cognition and brain structure and function in T2DM, with resistance and endurance exercise having similar effects. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
68/100
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Use of NSAIDs was associated with a lower risk of dementia (adjusted hazard ratio or aHR 0.76, 95% CI or CI 0.60-0.96) and, in particular, AD (aHR 0.63, CI 0.45-0.88), but not VaD (aHR 0.92, CI 0.65-1.28). 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 3,229 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We identified a new genetic risk association of AD with rare coding CLU variations that is independent of the 5' common association signal identified in the GWA studies. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,930 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Association of HT use and risk of AD may depend on timing of use. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Baseline assessments were conducted on 128 participants. 3 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 125 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Over follow-up, 449 (18.3%) participants developed dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This retrospective cohort study is to investigate the association between herpes simplex virus (HSV) infections and dementia, and the effects of anti-herpetic medications on the risk involved, using Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 33,448 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The overall unadjusted pooled odds ratio for the progression of MCI to dementia in people with diabetes/MetS was 1.67 (95% CI 1.27-2.19); the pooled odds ratio for progression in diabetes + MCI was 1.53 (95% CI 1.20-1.97) and in people with MetS + MCI was 2.95 (95% CI 1.23-7.05). 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 15 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In older women, habitual sleep duration predicts the future risk for cognitive impairments including dementia, independent of vascular risk factors. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The study encompassed 284 cases with dementia and 1080 controls. 1 key finding →
Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Moreover, biomarker plasma levels and rates of change over time of participants who developed Alzheimer's disease dementia during follow-up were compared with age and sex-matched dementia-free control subjects. 5 key findings →
Participants: 549 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Of 31 624 156 adults discharged from French hospitals between 2008 and 2013, 1 109 343 were diagnosed with dementia and were included in the analyses. 2 key findings →
Design: retrospective cohort Participants: 156 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
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 31,780 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 31,780 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (66% of the library) and OpenAlex (16%), 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.
1,052 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