Prevention of cognitive impairment and dementia is an important public health goal. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 11,140 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
72/100
Aerobic exercise has shown inconsistent cognitive effects in older adults with Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 96 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Participants allocated to CR received 10 weekly sessions over 3 months and four maintenance sessions over 6 months. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 475 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Peripheral inflammatory markers are elevated in patients with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 5,217 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) is a well-established group psychosocial intervention for people with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Vitamins and minerals play multiple functions within the central nervous system which may help to maintain brain health and optimal cognitive functioning. 4 key findings →
Participants: 28 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Study objectives To examine the association of sleep complaints reported at baseline (insomnia complaints and excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS)) and medication, with cognitive decline in community-dwelling elderly. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 4,894 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study aimed to investigate the association between a virtual reality (VR) intervention program and cognitive, brain and physical functions in high-risk older adults. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 68 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Epidemiologic evidence suggests that cognitive and physical activities are associated with better cognition in late life. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study is based on a population-based cohort of 7,839 subjects over 65 years with 7 years of follow-up. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 7,839 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Higher intake of omega-3 fatty acids (n-3 FAs) is associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and milder forms of cognitive impairment (e.g. cognitive impairment no dementia [CIND]); however, findings from interventional trials are inconsistent. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 934 Evidence: high
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Although both overt hyper- and hypothyroidism are known to lead to cognitive impairment, data on the association between subclinical thyroid dysfunction and cognitive function are conflicting. 4 key findings →
Participants: 6,410 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Contrary to early case-control studies that suggested smoking protects against Alzheimer disease (AD), recent prospective studies have shown that elderly who smoke may be at increased risk for dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 17,610 Evidence: moderate
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We examined whether cognitive function at baseline affected cognitive and cardiovascular outcomes in the Study on COgnition and Prognosis in the Elderly (SCOPE), a blood pressure (BP)-lowering intervention trial. 4 key findings →
Design: open-label trial Participants: 2,070 Evidence: low
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This study sought to replicate and build upon a previously published case series report describing improved cognitive function in five patients with mild-to-moderate dementia after 12 weeks of transcranial and intranasal near-infrared (NIR) PBM therapy. 4 key findings →
Evidence: high
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Age-related cognitive impairment and dementia are an increasing societal burden. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
62/100
We thus examined whether higher blood cholesterol concentrations were associated with faster cognitive decline in a community-based longitudinal study of Chinese elderly. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 90 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The influence of mixed dietary patterns on cognitive changes is unknown. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 2,223 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Public Psychiatric Hospital Rekem, Belgium. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
There is evidence that physical activity (PA) is of cognitive benefit to the ageing brain, but little is known on the effect in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Online literature databases and trial registers, previous systematic reviews and leading journals were searched for relevant randomised controlled trials. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Vitamin C plays a role in neuronal differentiation, maturation, myelin formation and modulation of the cholinergic, catecholinergic, and glutaminergic systems. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The role of atrial fibrillation in cognitive impairment and dementia, independent of stroke, is uncertain. 4 key findings →
Design: post-hoc analysis Participants: 31,506 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Six thousand thirty community-dwelling persons aged 65 to 95. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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
- 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 →