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.

Social isolation and cognitive decline in older adults: a longitudinal study across 24 countries

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 65 out of 100. BMC Geriatrics 2025-10-14

Social isolation was significantly associated with reduced cognitive ability (pooled effect = -0.07, 95% CI = -0.08, -0.05), with consistently negative effects across memory, orientation, and executive ability. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 101,581 Evidence: high

No significant difference between the three groups in ADAS-Cog was found at the primary endpoint at 15 months (CPR vs health advice, β= -0·04 [95% CI -0·34 to 0·26]; RFM vs health advice, β= -0·14 [-0·44 to 0·15]; CPR vs RFM, β=0·10 [-0·19 to 0·40]) nor at the 6-month and 12-month follow-ups. 1 key finding →

Design: RCT Participants: 456 Evidence: null result

Sleep duration is linked to amyloid-β clearance while physical activity is associated with brain volume maintenance. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 4,322 Evidence: high

The higher risk of AD among blacks may stem from lower level of cognitive test performance persisting throughout the observation period rather than faster rate of late-life cognitive decline. 5 key findings →

Participants: 7,735 Evidence: high

This trial found no benefit of 24-month multidomain intervention with focus on improvement in lifestyle and vascular risk factors on the incidence of poststroke cognitive decline in comparison with standard stroke care. 1 key finding →

Participants: 101 Evidence: high

Our pilot studies (National Institutes of Health [NIH] stage 1A) have shown that MHB is feasible, acceptable, and associated with improvement in lifestyle behavior and cognitive outcomes. 4 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 225 Evidence: high

Forty-one studies were included. 2 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high

Our study has identified not only risk factors associated with functional decline but also the interactions among these factors. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

PE improves global cognitive function (SMD = 0.348 [95 % CI 0.166 to 0.529]; p = 0.0001), executive function (SMD = 0.213 [95 % CI 0.026 to 0.400]; p = 0.026) and delayed recall (SMD = 0.180 [95 % CI 0.002 to 0.358]; p = 0.047). 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,077 Evidence: high

Sleep Duration and White Matter Quality in Middle-Aged Adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. Sleep 2016-09-01

Study objectives Sleep duration has been associated with risk of dementia and stroke, but few studies have investigated the relationship between sleep duration and brain MRI measures, particularly in middle age. 3 key findings →

Design: prospective cohort Evidence: moderate

The mean age was 70.9 years (standard deviation, 5.9), 57.2% were women, 40.6% were illiterate, and 88.3% were farmers. 2 key findings →

Participants: 5,765 Evidence: high

Association of hearing impairment with brain volume changes in older adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. NeuroImage 2014-01-09

Hearing impairment in older adults is independently associated in longitudinal studies with accelerated cognitive decline and incident dementia, and in cross-sectional studies, with reduced volumes in the auditory cortex. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 126 Evidence: moderate

PARO may have some effect on motor activity of older people with dementia in long-term care, but not on sleep patterns. 2 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high

Low daytime SBP was independently associated with a greater progression of cognitive decline in older patients with dementia and MCI among those treated with AHDs. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 172 Evidence: moderate

Effect of smoking on global cognitive function in nondemented elderly

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. Neurology 2004-03-01

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

Changes in cognitive functioning following treatment of late-life depression

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. The American journal of psychiatry 2000-12-01

Knowledge of the relationship between various clinical characteristics and cognitive functioning is advancing, but little is known about the cognitive response to treatment for geriatric depression. 4 key findings →

Participants: 45 Evidence: low

In particular, systemic inflammation, vascular inflammation, and altered endothelial function may play roles in domain-specific cognitive decline of nondemented individuals. 1 key finding →

Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 1,159 Evidence: low

There is evidence from a population-based study of an inverse relationship between monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) energy intake and age-related cognitive decline (ARCD), while high polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) intake was positively associated with cognitive impairment in elderly subjects. 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 704 Evidence: high

Efficacy Study participants (n = 1082, 40 clusters) were 75.1 ± 6.3 years old, 68.7% women, and 64.7% prefrail/frail; analytic clusters: 19 intervention (410/549 completed) vs. 21 control (375/533 completed). 2 key findings →

Participants: 1,082 Evidence: high

MIND diet is associated with better cognitive functioning independently of common brain pathology, suggesting that the MIND diet may contribute to cognitive resilience in the elderly. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 569 Evidence: moderate

A number of health and lifestyle factors are thought to contribute to cognitive decline associated with age but cannot be easily modified by the individual patient. 3 key findings →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

From across this tag

9 of the 1,130 studies in this tag, picked by a fixed rule (a hash of each study's address), not by score or date; each page of this list shows a different 9. The same 9 appear here every time.

↑ 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. 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed