Whether this results in an increased risk for dementia remains unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort Participants: 3,975 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
28,580 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Low bone mineral density (BMD) and dementia commonly co-occur in older individuals, with bone loss accelerating in patients with dementia due to physical inactivity and poor nutrition. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 3,651 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and their receptor (RAGE) are implicated in the pathophysiological processes of dementia and potentially underlie the association of diabetes with neurodegeneration. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,021 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The exact etiology of dementia is still unclear, but both genetic and lifestyle factors are thought to be key drivers of this complex disease. 1 key finding →
Participants: 6,352 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
During a mean follow-up of 12.1 years, 1,520 individuals developed dementia, 1,194 of whom had AD. 4 key findings →
Participants: 12,305 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
60/100
From 2000 to 2002, we assessed parental history of dementia in participants without dementia of the Rotterdam Study. 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,087 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
During follow-up, 60 individuals developed dementia, of which 49 had Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Participants: 1,322 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Vitamin D has gained interest as a potentially modifiable risk factor for dementia because of its putative neuroprotective effects. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 6,220 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
We investigated the associations between retinopathy and dementia and its subtypes Alzheimer disease (AD) and vascular dementia both cross-sectionally and prospectively in the Rotterdam Study, a large population-based cohort study. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 195 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Immunity has been suggested to be important in the pathogenesis of dementia. 4 key findings →
Participants: 8,313 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cognitive dysfunction is a common feature among patients with parkinsonism, including Parkinson disease (PD). 4 key findings →
Participants: 7,386 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Within the prospective population-based Rotterdam Study, we measured serum magnesium levels in 9,569 participants, free from dementia at baseline (1997-2008). 4 key findings →
Participants: 9,569 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Retinal vessels provide a unique opportunity to study both systemic and cerebrovascular disease. 4 key findings →
Participants: 5,553 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Adherence to the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet has been linked to a decreased risk of dementia, but reverse causality and residual confounding by lifestyle may partly account for this link. 4 key findings →
Participants: 5,375 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1) is a neuroinvasive virus capable of entering the brain which makes it a candidate pathogen for increasing risk of dementia. 4 key findings →
Participants: 244 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 →