27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
In analyses that addressed bias due to reverse causation, physical inactivity was not associated with all-cause dementia or Alzheimer's disease, although an indication of excess dementia risk was observed in a subgroup of physically inactive individuals who developed cardiometabolic disease. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 404 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Among 10 095 participants (67.3% men; aged 35-55 years in 1985-1988), a total of 1710 cases of diabetes and 639 cases of dementia were recorded over a median follow-up of 31.7 years. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 95 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
During 1 110 831 person-years at risk, we recorded 245 573 hospitalisations in the Finnish cohorts; the corresponding numbers in the UK study were 60 946 hospitalisations in 186 572 person-years. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 9,838 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The association between BMI and dementia is likely to be attributable to two different processes: a harmful effect of higher BMI, which is observable in long follow-up, and a reverse-causation effect that makes a higher BMI to appear protective when the follow-up is short. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 6,894 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study found no evidence of a neuroprotective effect of physical activity. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 329 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Adherence to the Life Simple 7 ideal cardiovascular health recommendations in midlife was associated with a lower risk of dementia later in life. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 7,899 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Sleep dysregulation is a feature of dementia but it remains unclear whether sleep duration prior to old age is associated with dementia incidence. 4 key findings →
Participants: 7,959 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The clinical value of current multifactorial algorithms for individualized assessment of dementia risk remains unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 4,865 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This expert commission synthesized decades of population-level (observational) research to estimate how much dementia risk could theoretically be reduced by addressing 14 modifiable risk factors across life, from childhood education to late-life social isolation. 3 key findings →
Design: systematic-review Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Using nearly 8,000 British civil servants followed for up to 25 years (the Whitehall II study), this study found that people who slept 6 hours or less per night in their 50s and 60s had a higher later risk of dementia than those sleeping about 7 hours, even after accounting for other health and social factors. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 7,959 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This unusually long 28-year study found no evidence that being physically active in midlife protects against dementia later in life. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 10,308 Evidence: null result
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This 28-year study tracked depressive symptoms in over 10,000 people and found that depression appearing later in life (closer to a dementia diagnosis) was linked to higher dementia risk, but depression in midlife (decades before diagnosis) was not. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 10,189 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This 23-year study found a U-shaped relationship between alcohol and dementia risk: people who abstained from alcohol in midlife, as well as those who drank heavily (more than 14 units, about 14 standard drinks, per week), both had a higher risk of developing dementia than people who drank moderately. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 9,087 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The CAIDE dementia and Framingham risk scores predict cognitive decline in late middle age but the Framingham risk scores may have an advantage over the dementia risk score for use in primary prevention for assessing risk of cognitive decline and targeting of modifiable risk factors. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The increasing number of people with dementia globally illustrates the urgent need to reduce dementia's scale and impact. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Social isolation and loneliness have been associated with increased risk of dementia, but it is not known whether this risk is modified or confounded by genetic risk of dementia. 4 key findings →
Participants: 70 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Higher pTau217 was associated with greater likelihood of developing dementia 11 years later. 5 key findings →
Participants: 3,935 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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 →