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.

Of 2846 articles identified, 94 studies were eligible, with up to 14 529 participants for WMH, 16 012 participants for BI, 15 693 participants for CMB, and 4587 participants for PVS. 2 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 529 Evidence: high

MRI features of cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD), i.e. white matter hyperintensities, lacunes, microbleeds, perivascular spaces, and cerebral atrophy, may be associated with clinical events, but the strength of these associations remains unclear. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 16,458 Evidence: high

Genome-wide association studies of cerebral white matter lesion burden: the CHARGE consortium

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100. Annals of neurology 2011-06-01

This large GWAS of WMH burden in community-based cohorts of individuals of European descent identifies a novel locus on chromosome 17. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,024 Evidence: high

White matter hyperintensities are frequent on neuroimaging of older people and are a key feature of cerebral small vessel disease. 1 key finding →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 4,006 Evidence: high

High and increasing blood pressure from early adulthood into midlife seems to be associated with increased WMHV and smaller brain volumes at 69-71 years of age. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 5,362 Evidence: moderate

Mild TBI and risk of Parkinson disease: A Chronic Effects of Neurotrauma Consortium Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. Neurology 2018-04-18

Among military veterans, mTBI is associated with 56% increased risk of PD, even after adjusting for demographics and medical/psychiatric comorbidities. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 325,870 Evidence: moderate

Common Genetic Variation Indicates Separate Causes for Periventricular and Deep White Matter Hyperintensities

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. Stroke 2020-06-10

Periventricular white matter hyperintensities (WMH; PVWMH) and deep WMH (DWMH) are regional classifications of WMH and reflect proposed differences in cause. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,654 Evidence: high

The Olink Proteomics panel of inflammation markers ( https://www.olink.com/products/inflammation/ ) will be used to evaluate 92 proteins associated with inflammatory diseases and related biological processes. 3 key findings →

Design: open-label trial Participants: 50 Evidence: high

Cerebral small vessel disease genomics and its implications across the lifespan

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Nature communications 2020-12-08

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common brain-imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), hypertension being the main known risk factor. 1 key finding →

Evidence: moderate

Pooled clinical and neuropathologic data from 3 prospective cohort studies indicate that TBI with LOC is associated with risk for Lewy body accumulation, progression of parkinsonism, and PD, but not dementia, AD, neuritic plaques, or neurofibrillary tangles. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 7,130 Evidence: moderate

Cerebral amyloid angiopathy and cognitive outcomes in community-based older persons

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Neurology 2015-11-04

We tested the hypothesis that cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) is related to Alzheimer disease (AD) dementia and decline in multiple cognitive systems in old age, independent of AD plaque and tangle pathology and other common age-related neuropathologies. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,113 Evidence: moderate

A single traumatic brain injury is associated with an increased risk of dementia and, in a proportion of patients surviving a year or more from injury, the development of hallmark Alzheimer's disease-like pathologies. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 52 Evidence: moderate

We identified 4 novel genetic loci that implicate inflammatory and glial proliferative pathways in the development of WMH in addition to previously proposed ischemic mechanisms. 2 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 17 Evidence: high

EDIC participants had consistently higher brain age values compared with controls without diabetes, indicative of approximately 6 additional years of brain aging (EDIC participants: β, 6.16; SE, 0.71; control participants: β, 1.04; SE, 0.04; P Conclusions and relevance The findings of this study suggest an increase in brain aging among individuals with T1D without any early signs of AD-related neurodegeneration. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 416 Evidence: high

Each level increase in the severity of atherosclerosis or arteriolosclerosis was associated with significantly higher odds of Alzheimer's disease dementia (odds ratio [OR] for atherosclerosis 1·33, 95% CI 1·11-1·58; OR for arteriolosclerosis 1·20, 1·04-1·40). 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,143 Evidence: moderate

Many coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) positive individuals exhibit abnormal electroencephalographic (EEG) activity reflecting "brain fog" and mild cognitive impairments even months after the acute phase of infection. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 19 Evidence: high

Midlife systemic inflammatory markers are associated with late-life brain volume: The ARIC study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100. Neurology 2017-11-01

Our prospective findings provide evidence for what may be an early contributory role of systemic inflammation in neurodegeneration and cognitive aging. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,633 Evidence: moderate

Cerebral amyloid angiopathy pathology and cognitive domains in older persons

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100. Annals of neurology 2010-11-08

Subjects were 404 persons in the Religious Orders Study, a cohort study of aging, who underwent annual clinical evaluations, including 19 neuropsychological tests from which 5 cognitive domain and global summary scores were derived, and brain autopsy at time-of-death (mean age-at-death 86). 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 404 Evidence: moderate

↑ 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.

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 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.

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 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed