27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Among the 1453 participants in the Framingham dementia study sample, the mean (SD) age was 75 (7) years; 792 (54.5%) were female. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,453 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Among participants in the Framingham Heart Study, the incidence of dementia has declined over the course of three decades. 3 key findings →
Participants: 5,205 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Low physical activity is associated with a higher risk for dementia in older individuals, suggesting that a reduced risk of dementia and higher brain volumes may be additional health benefits of maintaining physical activity into old age. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 3,714 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This long-running Massachusetts study tracked dementia rates over more than 30 years and found that a given person's chance of developing dementia at a given age has been steadily falling since the late 1970s. The decline was seen mainly in people with at least a high school education. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 5,205 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We analyzed prospectively collected data in the Original and Offspring FHS cohorts. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 4,906 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Metabolic dysregulation, especially insulin resistance, was associated with lower brain volumes and executive function in a large, relatively healthy, middle-aged, community-based cohort. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 2,439 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
It is associated with metabolic syndrome, incident diabetes, carotid atherosclerosis, and endothelial dysfunction, conditions that in turn are strongly linked with brain damage and cognitive impairment. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 766 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Lower RBC DHA levels are associated with smaller brain volumes and a "vascular" pattern of cognitive impairment even in persons free of clinical dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,575 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Circulating leptin was associated with a reduced incidence of dementia and AD and with cerebral brain volume in asymptomatic older adults. 4 key findings →
Participants: 785 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In women, increased plasma adiponectin levels are an independent risk factor for the development of both all-cause dementia and AD. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 159 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Dementia is an increasing focus for policymakers, civil organizations and multidisciplinary researchers. 5 key findings →
Design: narrative review Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The final Dementia Screening Indicator included age (1 point/year; ages, 65-79 years), less than 12 years of education (9 points), stroke (6 points), diabetes mellitus (3 points), body mass index less than 18.5 kg/m(2) (8 points), requiring assistance with money or medications (10 points), and depressive symptoms (6 points). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Ninety-nine new cases of dementia (including 71 of Alzheimer disease) occurred during the follow-up. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Artificially sweetened soft drink consumption was associated with a higher risk of stroke and dementia. 5 key findings →
Participants: 2,888 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Sleep disturbance is common in dementia, although it is unclear whether differences in sleep architecture precede dementia onset. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We categorized CVH on the basis of the American Heart Association Ideal CVH Index and genetic risk through a genetic risk score (GRS) of common genetic variants and the APOE ε4 genotype in 1,211 Framingham Heart Study (FHS) offspring cohort participants. 4 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 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.
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 →