27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
MCR is common in older adults, and is a strong and early risk factor for cognitive decline. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 26,802 Evidence: moderate
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The majority of community-dwelling older persons have brain pathology. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 80 Evidence: moderate
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A larger number of deaths are attributable to AD dementia in the United States each year than the number (<84,000 in 2010) reported on death certificates. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,566 Evidence: moderate
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Sleep fragmentation in older adults is associated with incident AD and the rate of cognitive decline. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 97 Evidence: moderate
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Of 586 included decedents, 415 (70.8%) were female, 171 (29.2%) were male, and the mean (SD) age at death was 90.9 (6.0) years. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 754 Evidence: moderate
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The pathophysiological process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is thought to begin many years before the diagnosis of AD dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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These results suggest that frequent participation in cognitively stimulating activities is associated with reduced risk of AD. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 111 Evidence: moderate
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Neuropathology was ubiquitous, with 94% of participants having 1+, 78% having 2+, 58% having 3+, and 35% having 4+. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,079 Evidence: moderate
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We tested the hypothesis that cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) is related to Alzheimer disease (AD) dementia and decline in multiple cognitive systems in old age, independent of AD plaque and tangle pathology and other common age-related neuropathologies. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,113 Evidence: moderate
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Alzheimer's dementia is significantly more common in women than in men. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 971 Evidence: moderate
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The incidence of MCR is high in older adults. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 3,128 Evidence: moderate
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Loneliness is associated with an increased risk of late-life dementia but not with its leading causes. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 76 Evidence: moderate
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Each level increase in the severity of atherosclerosis or arteriolosclerosis was associated with significantly higher odds of Alzheimer's disease dementia (odds ratio [OR] for atherosclerosis 1·33, 95% CI 1·11-1·58; OR for arteriolosclerosis 1·20, 1·04-1·40). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,143 Evidence: moderate
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Subjects were 404 persons in the Religious Orders Study, a cohort study of aging, who underwent annual clinical evaluations, including 19 neuropsychological tests from which 5 cognitive domain and global summary scores were derived, and brain autopsy at time-of-death (mean age-at-death 86). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 404 Evidence: moderate
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Biomarkers were measured in 431 Black and 583 White participants (mean age of 77 and 80 years and 17% and 21% of men, respectively), generating a balanced sample of 366:366. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 1,014 Evidence: moderate
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A higher level of total daily physical activity is associated with a reduced risk of AD. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 71 Evidence: moderate
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Greater purpose in life is associated with a reduced risk of all-cause mortality among community-dwelling older persons. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,238 Evidence: moderate
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The pathologic indices of Alzheimer disease, cerebrovascular disease, and Lewy body disease accumulate in the brains of older persons with and without dementia, but the extent to which they account for late life cognitive decline remains unknown. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 856 Evidence: moderate
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Early age at surgical menopause was associated with cognitive decline and AD neuropathology. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,884 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
NFTs in the substantia nigra are associated with gait impairment in older persons with and without dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 86 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Higher dietary intakes of flavonols may be associated with reduced risk of developing Alzheimer dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort Participants: 691 Evidence: moderate
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Among the 286 autopsied brains of 544 participants, brain mercury levels were positively correlated with the number of seafood meals consumed per week (ρ = 0.16; P = .02). 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 286 Evidence: moderate
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The results suggest that the contribution of education to cognitive reserve is limited to its association with level of cognitive function before old age. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,899 Evidence: moderate
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Black decedents with AD dementia are more likely to have mixed brain pathologies compared with age-, sex-, education-, and cognition-matched white decedents with AD dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 122 Evidence: moderate
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Better sleep consolidation attenuates the effect of APOE genotype on incident AD and development of neurofibrillary tangle pathology. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 698 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 →