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.

12,887 participants were interviewed at baseline. 11,718 were free of dementia, of whom 8137 (69%) were reinterviewed, contributing 34,718 person-years of follow-up. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 12,887 Evidence: moderate

In this study, risk of dementia significantly increased after ischemic stroke, independent of vascular risk factors. 5 key findings →

Design: prospective cohort Participants: 379 Evidence: moderate

Diabetes mellitus and the risk of dementia: The Rotterdam Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. Neurology 1999-12-01

The diabetes attributable risk for dementia of 8.8% suggests that diabetes may have contributed to the clinical syndrome in a substantial proportion of all dementia patients. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 126 Evidence: moderate

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

Antipsychotic drug use and mortality in older adults with dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. Annals of internal medicine 2007-06-01

Atypical antipsychotic use is associated with an increased risk for death compared with nonuse among older adults with dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 27,259 Evidence: moderate

Older adults with CVD other than stroke had a higher risk of dementia and AD than did those without CVD. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 3,602 Evidence: moderate

The relationship between body mass index (BMI) (in midlife and late-life) and dementia was investigated in meta-analyses of 16 articles reporting on 15 prospective studies. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 624 Evidence: high

A statistically significant age-adjusted association was observed between the A1C level and the score on all four cognitive tests. 3 key findings →

Evidence: low

The average life expectancy has increased substantially in the past few decades in most industrialized countries; however, not all of the increased life expectancy is being spent in optimal health, especially among individuals with low socioeconomic status. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 135 Evidence: moderate

We conducted a meta-analysis of the conflicting epidemiologic evidence on the association between midlife body mass index (BMI) and dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 19 Evidence: high

A total of 19 reviews containing 37 meta-analyses were included umbrella review. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 19 Evidence: high

In a study of 2.2 million adults in Ontario, Canada, people who lived very close to a major road (within 50 meters) had a small but statistically significant higher risk of developing dementia than those living farther away (over 300 meters), even after accounting for other health and demographic factors. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 2,200,000 Evidence: high

More frequent social contact at age 60 years was associated with lower dementia risk (hazard ratio [HR] for each SD higher social contact frequency = 0.88 [95% CI 0.79, 0.98], p = 0.02); effect size of the association of social contact at 50 or 70 years with dementia was similar (0.92 [95% CI 0.83, 1.02], p = 0.13 and 0.91 [95% CI 0.78, 1.06], p = 0.23, respectively) but not statistically significant. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 10,228 Evidence: moderate

Across the cohorts, each 10-year increase in BAI was associated with a 39% higher risk of incident dementia (hazard ratio [HR], 1.39 [95% CI, 1.21-1.59]; P Conclusions and relevance In this IPD meta-analysis, a higher sleep EEG-based BAI was associated with a higher risk of incident dementia. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 7,105 Evidence: moderate

Compared with respective matched nonusers, individuals receiving haloperidol had an increased mortality risk of 3.8% (95% CI, 1.0%-6.6%; P Conclusions and relevance The absolute effect of antipsychotics on mortality in elderly patients with dementia may be higher than previously reported and increases with dose. 5 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 90,786 Evidence: moderate

Association of incident dementia with hospitalizations

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2012-01-01

Four hundred ninety-four individuals eventually developed dementia and 427 (86%) of these persons were admitted at least once; 2525 remained free of dementia and 1478 (59%) of those were admitted at least once. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 3,019 Evidence: moderate

Prospective study of alcohol consumption and risk of dementia in older adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2003-03-01

Compared with abstention, consumption of 1 to 6 drinks weekly is associated with a lower risk of incident dementia among older adults. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 5,888 Evidence: moderate

Leisure activities and the risk of dementia in the elderly

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. The New England journal of medicine 2003-06-01

Participation in leisure activities is associated with a reduced risk of dementia, even after adjustment for base-line cognitive status and after the exclusion of subjects with possible preclinical dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: prospective cohort Participants: 469 Evidence: moderate

Sleep-disordered breathing, hypoxia, and risk of mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older women

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2011-08-01

Among older women, those with sleep-disordered breathing compared with those without sleep-disordered breathing had an increased risk of developing cognitive impairment. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 60 Evidence: low

From across this tag

10 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 10. The same 10 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 27,780 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.

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 27,780 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed