Physical exercise has been shown to increase brain volume and improve cognition in randomized trials of non-demented elderly. 2 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
27,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Higher baseline body mass index (BMI) and slower declining BMI in late life are associated with a reduced risk of dementia, suggesting that low BMI or a faster decline in BMI in late life may be preclinical indicators of an underlying dementing illness, especially for those who were initially overweight or obese. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Recent studies have associated immune abnormalities with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 50,864 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Microglia are the resident immune cells in the brain and have pivotal roles in neurodevelopment and neuroinflammation 1,2 . 2 key findings →
Evidence: early
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
55/100
Despite differences in prevalence of APOE-ε4, its association with dementia risk was similar across Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and non-Latino White participants. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 46,325 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These results may lead to a new avenue of inquiry in the prevention of Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (TDP-43) inclusions are a pathological hallmark of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), including cases caused by G 4 C 2 repeat expansions in the C9orf72 gene (c9FTD/ALS). 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Deposition of amyloid β protein (Aβ) to form neuritic plaques in the brain is the pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Twenty-five of 33 (75.8%) participants in the qigong group and 26 of 33 (78.8%) participants in the control group completed the 1-year exercise programs. 4 key findings →
Participants: 33 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia among older people. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
45/100
Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) will inevitably develop Alzheimer disease (AD) neuropathology sometime after middle age, which may be attributable to genes triplicated in individuals with DS. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Triggering receptors expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) is considered a protective factor to protect host from bacterial infection, while how it elicits this role is unclear. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Our data indicate that the retinal nerve fiber layer degeneration is paralleled with dementia progression. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
34/100
Proinflammatory cytokine macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) is a multifunctional cytokine and has been found involved in many neurological diseases such as Alzheimer disease (AD), epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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.
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 27,780 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 27,780 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.1% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.3%), 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 →