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.

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

Association Between Elevated Brain Amyloid and Subsequent Cognitive Decline Among Cognitively Normal Persons

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. JAMA 2017-06-01

Among the 445 participants (243 with normal amyloid, 202 with elevated amyloid), mean (SD) age was 74.0 (5.9) years, mean education was 16.4 (2.7) years, and 52% were women. 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 243 Evidence: moderate

CSF biomarkers of neuroinflammation and cerebrovascular dysfunction in early Alzheimer disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. Neurology 2018-07-27

Neuroinflammation and cerebrovascular dysfunction are early events occurring already at presymptomatic stages of AD and contribute to disease progression. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 508 Evidence: moderate

The Hawthorne Effect: a randomised, controlled trial

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. BMC medical research methodology 2007-07-03

We found that more intensive follow-up of individuals in a placebo-controlled clinical trial of Ginkgo biloba for treating mild-moderate dementia resulted in a better outcome than minimal follow-up, as measured by their cognitive functioning. 4 key findings →

Participants: 140 Evidence: high

Low SES substantially increased the risk of dementia and cognitive dysfunction, suggesting that public health strategies could reduce the dementia burden by reducing social inequalities. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,485,702 Evidence: high

The overall conversion rate from iRBD to an overt neurodegenerative syndrome was 6.3% per year, with 73.5% converting after 12-year follow-up. 5 key findings →

Participants: 1,280 Evidence: moderate

The study cohort included 568 patients (289 [50.9%] men; mean [SD] age, 70.5 [16.1] years) who died in the hospital or were discharged to hospice. 1 key finding →

Design: cohort study Participants: 568 Evidence: moderate

It has been suggested that various different vitamin and mineral supplements might be useful in maintaining cognitive function and delaying the onset of dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 516 Evidence: high

A recent Cochrane review of reality orientation therapy identified the need for large, well-designed, multi-centre trials. 4 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 201 Evidence: high

The association between metabolic syndrome (MetS) and incident dementia remains inconclusive. 4 key findings →

Design: prospective cohort Participants: 5,255 Evidence: moderate

Cohort studies have reported that midlife high total serum cholesterol (TC) is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in late-life but findings have been based on few studies and previous reviews have been limited by a lack of compatible data. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 23,338 Evidence: high

Midlife and late-life risk factors contributed to 22.7% and 16.5% of total dementia cases, respectively. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 37,931 Evidence: high

Pooled HRs indicated depression present in late-life (HR 1.95, 95% CI: 1.68–2.26; I 2 = 77.5%) and midlife (HR 1.56, 95% CI: 1.12–2.18; I 2 = 97.5%) significantly increased risk of all-cause dementia. 2 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 901,762 Evidence: high

Changes in β-amyloid (Aβ) and hyperphosphorylated tau (T) in brain and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) precede Alzheimer's disease (AD) symptoms, making the CSF proteome a potential avenue to understand disease pathophysiology and facilitate reliable diagnostics and therapies. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high

Between Feb 24, 2021, and March 5, 2023, 377 dyads were randomly assigned (1:1), 189 to usual treatment and 188 to intervention. 2 key findings →

Design: RCT Participants: 377 Evidence: high

Exercise intensity did not differentially affect cognitive trajectory. 2 key findings →

Design: phase-3-trial Participants: 296 Evidence: moderate

We aimed to determine the effect of live attenuated herpes zoster vaccination on incident dementia diagnoses among people aged 70 years and older using a natural experiment in Ontario, Canada, and to triangulate these findings, using a second natural experiment in Ontario and a quasi-experimental approach that uses data from multiple Canadian provinces. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 232,124 Evidence: moderate

Delirium and incident dementia in hospital patients in New South Wales, Australia: retrospective cohort study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. BMJ 2024-03-27

The study findings suggest delirium was a strong risk factor for death and incident dementia among older adult patients. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 110,422 Evidence: moderate

Association Between Consumption of Ultraprocessed Foods and Cognitive Decline

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. JAMA Neurology 2023-02-01

A higher percentage of daily energy consumption of ultraprocessed foods was associated with cognitive decline among adults from an ethnically diverse sample. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 10,775 Evidence: moderate

In this prospective cohort study, we included adults aged 40 years or older with subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment, or dementia, based on cognitive test results and clinical assessments, consecutively recruited at two memory clinics in Sweden, as part of the Swedish BioFINDER-2 study. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 572 Evidence: high

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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