28,180 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Periventricular white matter hyperintensities (WMH; PVWMH) and deep WMH (DWMH) are regional classifications of WMH and reflect proposed differences in cause. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,654 Evidence: high
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Healthy cognitive ageing is a societal and public health priority. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 22,059 Evidence: moderate
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Dementia risk may be attenuated by physical activity (PA); however, the specific activity levels optimal for dementia prevention are unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,604 Evidence: moderate
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Midlife vascular risk burden is associated with late-life dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 502 Evidence: moderate
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It is uncertain whether typical variants causing monogenic stroke are associated with cerebrovascular disease in the general population and why the phenotype of these variants varies so widely. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 454 Evidence: moderate
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A total of 16 084 European adults from 8 cohort studies (mean age range, 56.9±12.3-82.1±4.2 years) of the European Eye Epidemiology (E3) consortium. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 16 Evidence: high
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Plasma amyloid-β (Aβ) levels are increasingly studied as a potential, accessible marker of cognitive impairment and dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,201 Evidence: high
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We postulated that cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), characterised by cortical vascular amyloid deposits, is associated with cortical tissue loss independent of parenchymal Alzheimer's disease pathology. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 63 Evidence: moderate
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Cerebral small vessel disease is a major cause of stroke and dementia, but its genetic basis is incompletely understood. 4 key findings →
Participants: 42,310 Evidence: low
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From the population-based Rotterdam Study, 4,447 participants underwent dietary assessment and brain MRI scanning between 2005 and 2015. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 4,447 Evidence: moderate
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White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) are commonly assumed to represent non-specific cerebrovascular disease comorbid to neurodegenerative processes, rather than playing a synergistic role. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 571 Evidence: moderate
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We evaluated dementia-free Framingham Heart Study (generation 3) participants (mean age 48.5 years, 46.8% men) who underwent cognitive testing for memory, abstract reasoning, visual perception, attention, and executive function (n = 2,231) and brain MRI (n = 2018) to assess total white matter, lobar gray matter, and white matter hyperintensity volumes and fractional anisotropy (FA) measures. 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,231 Evidence: low
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Given the potential therapeutic effect of vascular disease control timing to reduce dementia risk, we investigated the age-related influences of vascular risk factor burden on brain structure throughout the lifespan. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 2,887 Evidence: moderate
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Cerebral blood flow (CBF) velocity is decreased in patients with Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →
Participants: 1,716 Evidence: low
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Apolipoprotein (APOE) e4 genotype is an accepted risk factor for accelerated cognitive aging and dementia, though its neurostructural substrates are unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 8,395 Evidence: moderate
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Medical imaging provides numerous insights into the subclinical changes that precede serious diseases such as heart disease and dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
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The sample included dementia-free participants (mean age 40 ± 9 years; 53% women) of the Framingham Heart Study third-generation cohort with cognitive testing of memory, abstract reasoning, visual perception, attention, and executive function (n = 2,126). 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,126 Evidence: moderate
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Men, but not women, with unrecognized myocardial infarction (MI) have an increased risk of cardiac events and stroke compared with those without MI or with recognized MI. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 613 Evidence: moderate
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The American Heart Association developed the ideal cardiovascular health (CVH) index as a simple tool to promote CVH; yet, its association with brain atrophy and dementia remains unexamined. 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,750 Evidence: moderate
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Cysteine-altering NOTCH3 variants identical to those causing the rare monogenic form of stroke, CADASIL (cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy), have been reported more common than expected in the general population, but their clinical significance and contribution to stroke and dementia risk in the community remain unclear. 4 key findings →
Participants: 200 Evidence: low
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Perivascular spaces (PVS) visible on MRI scans may represent key aspects in the pathophysiology of stroke and dementia, including cerebral small vessel disease and glymphatic dysfunction. 4 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
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Obesity has been associated with increased risk of accelerated cognitive decline and dementia, which suggests underlying neurobiological changes. 4 key findings →
Participants: 87 Evidence: low
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Higher vitamin D status has been suggested to have beneficial effects on the brain. 4 key findings →
Participants: 33,523 Evidence: low
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In a previous study of normal elderly male twins, the heritability of quantitative white matter hyperintensity (WMH) volume has been estimated to be high (0.73). 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,012 Evidence: moderate
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Obesity is associated with lower brain volumes in cognitively normal elderly subjects, but no study has yet investigated the effects of obesity on brain structure in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Participants: 399 Evidence: low
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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 28,180 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 28,180 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.7% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.1%), 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 →