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.

Dementia is a heterogeneous neurodegenerative disease, whose etiology results from a complex interplay between environmental and genetic factors. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 76 Evidence: high

Association of Ultraprocessed Food Consumption With Risk of Dementia: A Prospective Cohort Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Neurology 2022-07-27

In this prospective cohort study, higher consumption of UPF was associated with higher risk of dementia, whereas substituting unprocessed or minimally processed foods for UPF was associated with lower risk of dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 72,083 Evidence: moderate

SGLT2 Inhibitor Use and Risk of Dementia and Parkinson Disease Among Patients With Type 2 Diabetes

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Neurology 2024-09-18

In this nationwide population-based study, SGLT2i use significantly reduced the risks of neurodegenerative disorders in patients with type 2 diabetes independent of various factors including comorbidities and bioclinical parameters. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 358,862 Evidence: moderate

Hearing Loss, Hearing Aid Use, and Risk of Dementia in Older Adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery 2024-02-01

The results of this cohort study suggest that hearing loss was associated with increased dementia risk, especially among people not using hearing aids, suggesting that hearing aids might prevent or delay the onset and progression of dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 573,088 Evidence: moderate

The negative association between depression treatment and incident dementia was significant in the increasing and chronically low courses, highlighting the necessity of timely interventional strategies before depression progresses to a chronically severe state. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 354,313 Evidence: moderate

Over 10 years of close clinical dementia surveillance in this cohort study, loneliness was associated with increased dementia risk; this tripled in adults whose baseline risk would otherwise be relatively low on the basis of age and genetic risk, representing a majority of the US population. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 2,308 Evidence: moderate

The patients receiving regular PPI medication (n = 2950; mean [SD] age, 83.8 [5.4] years; 77.9% female) had a significantly increased risk of incident dementia compared with the patients not receiving PPI medication (n = 70,729; mean [SD] age, 83.0 [5.6] years; 73.6% female) (hazard ratio, 1.44 [95% CI, 1.36-1.52]; P Conclusions and relevance The avoidance of PPI medication may prevent the development of dementia. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 2,950 Evidence: high

High total cholesterol levels in late life associated with a reduced risk of dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Neurology 2005-05-01

High cholesterol in late life was associated with decreased dementia risk, which is in contrast to previous studies suggesting high cholesterol in mid-life is a risk factor for later dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 392 Evidence: moderate

Socioeconomic differences in dementia risk can be partly explained by differences in modifiable health conditions and lifestyle factors. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 6,346 Evidence: moderate

Trajectories of Depressive Symptoms Before Diagnosis of Dementia: A 28-Year Follow-up Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. JAMA psychiatry 2017-07-01

Those reporting depressive symptoms in 1985 (mean follow-up, 27 years) did not have significantly increased risk for dementia (hazard ratio [HR], 1.21; 95% CI, 0.95-1.54) in Cox regression adjusted for sociodemographic covariates, health behaviors, and chronic conditions. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 322 Evidence: moderate

Existing studies have included a narrow range of infectious diseases, relied on short follow-up periods, and provided little evidence for whether the increased risk is limited to specific dementia subtypes or attributable to specific microbes rather than infection burden. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 490 Evidence: moderate

Is personality associated with dementia risk? A meta-analytic investigation

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Ageing research reviews 2021-02-06

This study provides a quantitative synthesis of the prospective associations between personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness) and the risk of incident Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 30,036 Evidence: high

Compared with no sensory impairment, DSI was associated with increased risk of all-cause dementia (hazard ratio [HR], 2.60; 95% CI, 1.66-2.06; P Conclusions and relevance In this cohort study, DSI was associated with increased risk of dementia, particularly AD. 5 key findings →

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

Between 2001, and 2012, we identified 243 611 incident cases of dementia, 31 577 cases of Parkinson's disease, and 9247 cases of multiple sclerosis. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study 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

The authors assessed the association of smoking with dementia and cognitive decline in a meta-analysis of 19 prospective studies with at least 12 months of follow-up. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,374 Evidence: high

Recurrent depressive symptoms and the incidence of dementia and mild cognitive impairment

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Neurology 2010-07-01

Our findings support the hypothesis that depression is a risk factor for dementia and suggest that recurrent depression is particularly pernicious. 3 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,239 Evidence: moderate

DNA methylation algorithms are increasingly used to estimate biological aging; however, how these proposed measures of whole-organism biological aging relate to aging in the brain is not known. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 649 Evidence: moderate

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