Of 8171 patients with late-life depression, 1443 (17.7 %) had TRLLD. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 8,171 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Research
28,580 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Late-life depression (LLD), compared to depression at a young age, is more likely to have poor prognosis and high risk of progression to dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We carried out systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate whether peripheral levels of pro-inflammatory markers including Interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β), Interleukin-6 (IL-6), Tumor Necrosis Factor-α (TNF- α) and C-Reactive Protein (CRP) are significantly higher in elderly with depression and Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Cognitive dysfunction is common in late life depression (LLD) and is a major risk factor for dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
In the full cohort, 9.4% were diagnosed with major depression and 8.6% had chronically elevated depressive symptoms, both of which were related to adverse cognitive outcomes. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,965 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A history of depression may confer an increased risk for later developing AD. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
In the incident depression group, there was a mild decline in cognitive scores from baseline to the visit before depression onset compared with the never-depressed group. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 96 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Across 3544 participants, ≥65 years of age, with no diagnosed dementia-related disorders, the depression symptom everything was an effort showed high expected influence across all time points. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 3,544 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Late-life depression remains an underdiagnosed clinical entity, mainly because the presence of cognitive impairment in the elderly leads clinicians to suspect dementia rather than depression. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 72 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The diagnostic criteria continued to result in rather frequent diagnosis of comorbidity. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 397 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This study included 407 participants (96 Thal, 405 Braak, and 406 CERAD). 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 407 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Social isolation and loneliness are increasingly recognized as detrimental risk factors for brain health. 3 key findings →
Participants: 383,421 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Depression symptoms before the onset of AD are associated with the development of AD, even in families where first depression symptoms occurred more than 25 years before the onset of AD. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 1,953 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Depression and dementia are both common conditions in older people, and they frequently occur together. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Irreversible dementia developed significantly more frequently in the depressed group with reversible dementia (43%) than in the group with depression alone (12%). 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 23 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
57/100
The existing evidence paints an unclear picture of whether an association exists between depression and memory impairment. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Higher cognitive (HR: 0.91/SD, 95%CI: 0.84; 1.00) and brain reserve (HR: 0.88/SD, 95%CI: 0.77; 1.00) were associated with a lower risk of a depressive event after adjustment for baseline depressive symptoms. 5 key findings →
Participants: 105 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This narrative review aimed to explore the existing knowledge in order to examine the multiple forms of late-life depression (LLD) within a non-neurodegenerative or a neurodegenerative context, in particular Alzheimer's disease (AD). 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Late-life depression (LLD) increases risk for dementia and brain pathology, but possibly this is only true for one or more symptom profiles of LLD. 1 key finding →
Participants: 4,354 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A total of 66 patients with MDD (n = 50) and BD (n = 16) were analyzed. 5 key findings →
Participants: 50 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Compared with LLD patients without OI impairment and normal controls, LLD patients with OI impairment exhibited increased FC between the left orbital frontal cortex (OFC) and left calcarine gyrus, between the left OFC and right lingual gyrus, between the right OFC and right rectus gyrus, and decreased FC between the right piriform cortex and right superior parietal lobule. 5 key findings →
Participants: 150 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Depression symptoms were observed in 33.8% of LTCF residents. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
LOD patients exhibited lower OI scores than EOD patients and normal controls (NCs). 5 key findings →
Participants: 179 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Late-life depression has been consistently associated with lower gray matter volume, the origin of which remains largely unexplained. 4 key findings →
Participants: 24 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Higher scores on the appetite and weight loss symptom factor were associated with an increased hazard of both AD and non-AD dementia. 5 key findings →
Participants: 290 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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 28,580 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 28,580 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (62.2% of the library) and OpenAlex (17.8%), 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 (3.6% 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 →