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.

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

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

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

Blood pressure from mid- to late life and risk of incident dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. Neurology 2017-11-08

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

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

Remote Blood Biomarkers of Longitudinal Cognitive Outcomes in a Population Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 66 out of 100. Annals of neurology 2020-09-29

Higher concentrations of serum biomarkers were associated with the development of clinical AD; especially, the time-specific associations were notable: t-tau 8 to 16 years, and Nf-L and GFAP 4 to 8 years prior to clinical AD. 3 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,327 Evidence: moderate

Impact of multiple pathologies on the threshold for clinically overt dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 66 out of 100. Acta neuropathologica 2017-05-09

Longitudinal clinical-pathological studies have increasingly recognized the importance of mixed pathologies (the coexistence of one or more neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular disease pathologies) as important factors in the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other forms of dementia. 1 key finding →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

Physical exercise has been shown to increase brain volume and improve cognition in randomized trials of non-demented elderly. 2 key findings →

Evidence: high

Progression of mild cognitive impairment to dementia in clinic- vs community-based cohorts

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. Archives of neurology 2009-09-01

These findings add to the growing literature to suggest that the degree of functional impairment at baseline is an important predictor of conversion to dementia and may help explain differences in findings between epidemiological and clinic-based studies. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 28 Evidence: moderate

Fornix body volume and axial diffusivity were highly significant predictors (P = .02 and .005, respectively) of cognitive decline from normal cognition. 3 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 102 Evidence: moderate

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

Association of Chronic Low-grade Inflammation With Risk of Alzheimer Disease in ApoE4 Carriers

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 63 out of 100. JAMA network open 2018-10-05

Median (interquartile range) CRP levels increased with mean (SD) age (43.3 [9.6] years, 0.95 mg/L [0.40-2.35 mg/L] vs 59.1 [9.6] years, 2.04 mg/L [0.93-4.75 mg/L] vs 61.6 [9.5] years, 2.21 mg/L [1.05-5.12 mg/L]; P Conclusions and relevance In this study, peripheral chronic low-grade inflammation in participants with ApoE4 was associated with shortened latency for onset of AD. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

Adjusted estimates of MTA were associated with significantly increased risk of developing dementia within 3 years, suggesting that obtaining a magnetic resonance image during the evaluation of MCI may offer additional independent information about the risk of progression to dementia. 2 key findings →

Participants: 190 Evidence: low

The neuropsychologic test battery from the Uniform Data Set (UDS) of the Alzheimer's Disease Centers (ADC) program of the National Institute on Aging consists of brief measures of attention, processing speed, executive function, episodic memory, and language. 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

In this diverse community-based cohort, cross-sectional data revealed significant race/ethnic disparities in the prevalence of MCI and dementia. 3 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 989 Evidence: moderate

In a large community-based sample of middle-aged adults, BI predicted an increased risk of stroke and dementia independent of vascular risk factors. 5 key findings →

Participants: 1,694 Evidence: moderate

Vascular risk at younger ages most strongly associates with current and future brain volume

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 60 out of 100. Neurology 2018-09-19

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

Elevated midlife blood pressures, and the resulting increased white matter hyperintensities, increase the risk for MCI in a group of community-dwelling older men to at least the same degree as apolipoprotein E4 genotype. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

Glucose indices are associated with cognitive and structural brain measures in young adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 57 out of 100. Neurology 2015-05-06

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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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 27,380 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.

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 27,380 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed