27,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Pooling data on more than 600,000 people, this meta-analysis found that people who reported feeling lonely had about a 30% higher risk of developing dementia overall, and even higher risk for vascular dementia specifically, even after accounting for depression and objective social isolation. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 608,561 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The first single-stage individual patient data meta-analysis from randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials provides evidence to support benefits of antihypertensive treatment in late-mid and later life to lower the risk of dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 28,008 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We identified 22 hospital-based and eight population-based eligible cohorts (7511 patients) described in 73 papers. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 7,511 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Main results We included two trials with 26,340 participants aged 40 to 82 years of whom 11,610 were aged 70 or older. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,340 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this sample of 101 219 patients, 52.7% were women and mean age was 62.6 years (SD, 9.3 years) as of November 1, 2016. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 101,219 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results Seventeen trials with 1067 participants met the inclusion criteria. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,067 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Neurotropic herpesviruses may be implicated in the development of dementia 1-5 . 1 key finding →
Design: cohort Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study demonstrates robust evidence that complex patterns of mental activity in the early, mid- and late-life stages is associated with a significant reduction in dementia incidence. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 29,000 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
This systematic review and meta-analyses covering a wide range of observational studies and diverse settings provides robust support for the CR hypothesis. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 437,477 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Hearing loss is independently associated with incident all-cause dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 639 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Being married is associated with reduced risk of dementia than widowed and lifelong single people, who are also underdiagnosed in routine clinical practice. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 15 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Using datasets from a wide range of geographical regions, we found that both early life education and adulthood occupational complexity were independently predictive of dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 10,195 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We found no evidence to suggest that the current assumption of constant age-specific prevalence of dementia over time is ill-founded. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Increasing crystallised intelligence and fruit and vegetable consumption and eliminating depression and diabetes are likely to have the biggest impact on reducing the incidence of dementia, outweighing even the effect of removing the principal known genetic risk factor. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,433 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
PM 2.5 might be a risk factor for dementia, as well as nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxide, although with more limited data. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We found no significant association for exposure to nitrogen oxides (five studies, n=241 409, pooled adjusted HR per 10 μg/m 3 increase, 1·05 [0·97-1·13]; I 2 =44%), PM 10 (four studies, n=246 440, pooled adjusted HR per 15 μg/m 3 increase, 1·52 [0·80-2·87]; I 2 =82%), or annual ozone (four studies, n=419 972, pooled adjusted HR per 45 μg/m 3 increase, 0·82 [0·35-1·92]; I 2 =69%), with moderate to considerable heterogeneity between studies in these pooled analyses. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 24,030,527 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The management of symptomatic orthostatic hypotension, autonomic symptoms and depression, and the encouragement of physical activity may provide the core elements for the most fruitful strategy to reduce falls in people with dementia. 2 key findings →
Participants: 179 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Classification of evidence This study provides Class II evidence that specific dual-task training improves dual-task performance during walking under complex S3 conditions in geriatric patients with mild to moderate dementia. 3 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Lifestyle for Brain Health (LIBRA) may help in identifying and monitoring risk status in dementia-prevention programmes, by targeting modifiable, lifestyle-related risk factors. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 949 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Ageing of the population, together with population growth, has brought along an ample increase in the number of older individuals living with dementia and disabilities. 5 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This expert commission synthesized decades of population-level (observational) research to estimate how much dementia risk could theoretically be reduced by addressing 14 modifiable risk factors across life, from childhood education to late-life social isolation. 3 key findings →
Design: systematic-review Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Cognitive reserve (CR) may reduce the risk of dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis 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. Show only studies that are free to read
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 27,780 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 27,780 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.1% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.3%), 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 (3.7% 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 →