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.

The incidence rate of dementia in Europe and North America has declined by 13% per decade over the past 25 years, consistently across studies. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 49,202 Evidence: moderate

In analyses that addressed bias due to reverse causation, physical inactivity was not associated with all-cause dementia or Alzheimer's disease, although an indication of excess dementia risk was observed in a subgroup of physically inactive individuals who developed cardiometabolic disease. 2 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 404 Evidence: high

Over a long period of observation, no evidence was found that a specific AHM drug class was more effective than others in lowering risk of dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 31 Evidence: high

Midlife and late-life risk factors contributed to 22.7% and 16.5% of total dementia cases, respectively. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 37,931 Evidence: high

Midlife vascular risk factor exposure accelerates structural brain aging and cognitive decline

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. Neurology 2011-08-01

Our aim was to test the association of vascular risk factor exposure in midlife with progression of MRI markers of brain aging and measures of cognitive decline. 1 key finding →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,352 Evidence: moderate

Cancer survivors had a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease than those without cancer, and patients with Alzheimer's disease had a lower risk of incident cancer. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,278 Evidence: moderate

Association Between Slow-Wave Sleep Loss and Incident Dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. JAMA Neurology 2023-12-01

From the 868 Framingham Heart Study participants who returned for a second PSG, this cohort included 346 participants with a mean age of 69 years (range, 60-87 years); 179 (52%) were female. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 346 Evidence: early

Fasting lipid fractions (triglycerides [TGs], high-density lipoprotein cholesterol [HDL-C], low-density lipoprotein cholesterol [LDL-C], total cholesterol [TC]) were studied as continuous variables, and results are reported per SD increase of each lipid fraction. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 9,294 Evidence: moderate

Blood pressure from mid- to late life and risk of incident dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. Neurology 2017-11-08

Elevated blood pressure during midlife, persistence of elevated blood pressure into late life, and, among nonhypertensives, a steep decline in blood pressure during mid- to late life were associated with an increased dementia risk in a community-based cohort. 5 key findings →

Participants: 1,440 Evidence: moderate

Low cardiac index is associated with incident dementia and Alzheimer disease: the Framingham Heart Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 65 out of 100. Circulation 2015-02-19

Cross-sectional epidemiological and clinical research suggests that lower cardiac index is associated with abnormal brain aging, including smaller brain volumes, increased white matter hyperintensities, and worse cognitive performances. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 184 Evidence: moderate

Hearing Loss, Brain Structure, Cognition, and Dementia Risk in the Framingham Heart Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 65 out of 100. JAMA Network Open 2025-11-05

Sample 1 included 1656 participants (mean [range] age, 58.1 [29.7-85.6] years; 903 female [54.5%]), and sample 2 included 935 participants (mean [range] age, 67.6 [60.0-85.6] years; 518 female [55.4%]). 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,656 Evidence: moderate

The pooled sample comprised 4657 participants (30% women) aged ≥ 60 years (mean age was 74 years at sleep assessment). 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 2,374 Evidence: moderate

Serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor and the risk for dementia: the Framingham Heart Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 63 out of 100. JAMA neurology 2014-01-01

Some prior studies showed lower circulating BDNF in persons with Alzheimer disease (AD) compared with control participants; however, it remains uncertain whether reduced levels precede dementia onset. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 140 Evidence: moderate

The association between vascular risk factors and dementia varies with age, making generalizability of dementia risk prediction rules to individuals of different ages challenging. 4 key findings →

Participants: 4,899 Evidence: moderate

The study sample included 1,375 participants free of dementia and stroke at baseline (mean age 68 ± 6y, 54 % females). 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,375 Evidence: moderate

Differences between users and non-users of insulin, metformin and sulfonylurea were assessed in each cohort for cognitive and brain MRI measures using linear regression models, and cognitive decline and dementia/AD risk using mixed effect models and Cox regression analyses, respectively. 4 key findings →

Participants: 3,590 Evidence: moderate

The objective of this study was to investigate whether increased NLR in older adults is independently associated with the risk of subsequent dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,648 Evidence: moderate

Physical Activity Over the Adult Life Course and Risk of Dementia in the Framingham Heart Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 62 out of 100. JAMA Network Open 2025-11-19

This study included 1526 early adult-life (mean [SD] age, 36.7 [4.7] years; 821 [53.8%] female), 1943 midlife (mean [SD] age, 54.0 [5.8] years; 1010 [52.0%] female), and 885 late-life (mean [SD] age, 71.0 [4.5] years; 473 [53.4%] female) participants. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,526 Evidence: moderate

Circulating metabolites were consistently associated with cognition, dementia, and lifestyle factors, opening new avenues for prevention of cognitive decline and dementia. 4 key findings →

Participants: 25,872 Evidence: low

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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