27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
With no effective treatments for cognitive decline or dementia, improving the evidence base for modifiable risk factors is a research priority. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 48,522 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Points• UK Biobank is a very large and detailed prospective study with over 500,000 participants aged 40-69 years when recruited in 2006-2010.• The study has collected and continues to collect extensive phenotypic and genotypic detail about its participants, including data from questionnaires, physical measures, sample assays, accelerometry, multimodal imaging, genome-wide genotyping and longitudinal follow-up for a wide range of health-related outcomes.• Wide consultation; input from scientific, management, legal, and ethical partners; and industrial-scale, centralised processes have been essential to the development of this resource.• UK Biobank is available for open access, without the need for collaboration, to any bona fide researcher who wishes to use it to conduct health-related research for the benefit of the public. 1 key finding →
Design: case-control study Participants: 500,000 Evidence: moderate
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We also determined the extent to which sex, educational attainment, and apolipoprotein E ε4 allele (APOE*4) carrier status were associated with decline. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 42,170 Evidence: moderate
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This study reports the findings of the first large-scale Phase III investigator-driven clinical trial to slow the rate of cognitive decline in Alzheimer disease with a dihydropyridine (DHP) calcium channel blocker, nilvadipine. 4 key findings →
Participants: 577 Evidence: high
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We found that distinct sphingolipid species including sphingomyelin (SM) with acyl residue sums C16:0, C18:1, and C16:1 (SM C16:0, SM C18:1, SM C16:1) and hydroxysphingomyelin with acyl residue sum C14:1 (SM (OH) C14:1) were consistently associated with severity of AD pathology at autopsy and AD progression across prodromal and preclinical stages. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 44 Evidence: moderate
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More frequent social contact at age 60 years was associated with lower dementia risk (hazard ratio [HR] for each SD higher social contact frequency = 0.88 [95% CI 0.79, 0.98], p = 0.02); effect size of the association of social contact at 50 or 70 years with dementia was similar (0.92 [95% CI 0.83, 1.02], p = 0.13 and 0.91 [95% CI 0.78, 1.06], p = 0.23, respectively) but not statistically significant. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 10,228 Evidence: moderate
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There is an extensive body of qualitative literature on the experiences of community-dwelling individuals with dementia on receiving and adapting to a diagnosis of dementia. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Participants: 3,095 Evidence: high
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Cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) is a well-established group psychosocial intervention for people with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
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We found up to 270-fold genetic enrichment between FTD and RA, up to 160-fold genetic enrichment between FTD and UC, up to 180-fold genetic enrichment between FTD and T1D, and up to 175-fold genetic enrichment between FTD and CeD. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 192,886 Evidence: low
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Fasting lipid fractions (triglycerides [TGs], high-density lipoprotein cholesterol [HDL-C], low-density lipoprotein cholesterol [LDL-C], total cholesterol [TC]) were studied as continuous variables, and results are reported per SD increase of each lipid fraction. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 9,294 Evidence: moderate
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We tested whether dysregulation of cholesterol catabolism, through its conversion to primary bile acids (BAs), was associated with dementia pathogenesis. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 141 Evidence: moderate
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We aimed to inform planning by assessing intrinsic capacity prevalence, by characterising the target group, and by validating the general approach-testing hypotheses that DIC was consistently associated with higher risks of incident dependence and death. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 17,031 Evidence: moderate
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Intake of coffee alone or in combination with tea was associated with lower risk of poststroke dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 365,682 Evidence: moderate
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An algorithm-derived diagnosis of aMCI showed few sociodemographic associations but was consistently associated with higher disability and neuropsychiatric symptoms in addition to showing substantial variation in prevalence across LAMIC populations. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 15,376 Evidence: moderate
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The ε4 allele of apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene and increasing age are two of the most important known risk factors for developing Alzheimer disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,593 Evidence: moderate
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Apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 is the single most important genetic risk factor for cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease (AD), while lifestyle factors such as smoking, drinking, diet, and physical activity also have impact on cognition. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
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Secondary analysis suggested that this effect may be driven primarily by individuals who are negative for the established AD genetic risk factor, apolipoprotein E (APOE) ɛ4. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 346 Evidence: moderate
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Amyloid protein precursor (APP), presenilin-1 (PSEN1), and presenilin-2 (PSEN2) mutations cause autosomal dominant forms of early-onset Alzheimer disease (AD-EOAD). 4 key findings →
Participants: 170 Evidence: low
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Overall, cumulative incidence was uniformly higher in NACC than in the population-based cohorts. 3 key findings →
Participants: 5,073 Evidence: moderate
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Although altered lipid metabolism has been extensively implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer disease (AD) through cell biological, epidemiological, and genetic studies, the molecular mechanisms linking cholesterol and AD pathology are still not well understood and contradictory results have been reported. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 10,578 Evidence: moderate
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No significant differences emerged in the probability of conversion from MCI to AD or dementia between the treated groups and the placebo groups. 5 key findings →
Evidence: high
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At the beginning of June 2020, there were nearly 7 million reported cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) worldwide and over 400,000 deaths in people with COVID-19. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
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Such AR estimates cannot be derived from the living population; rather they estimate the relative contribution of specific pathologies to dementia at death. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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Women's reproductive factors have been associated with the risk of dementia; however, these findings remain uncertain. 4 key findings →
Participants: 273,240 Evidence: low
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Cross-sectional associations support the view that enhancing cognitive reserve may benefit cognition, and maintenance of cognitive health may be supported by a healthy and active lifestyle, in later life. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate
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.
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 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.
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 →