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.

Diabetes mellitus and the risk of dementia: The Rotterdam Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. Neurology 1999-12-01

The diabetes attributable risk for dementia of 8.8% suggests that diabetes may have contributed to the clinical syndrome in a substantial proportion of all dementia patients. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 126 Evidence: moderate

During mean follow-up of 2.1 (range 1.5-3.4) years, 146 incident cases of dementia were detected, of which 105 were Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 6,870 Evidence: moderate

Effect of smoking on global cognitive function in nondemented elderly

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. Neurology 2004-03-01

Contrary to early case-control studies that suggested smoking protects against Alzheimer disease (AD), recent prospective studies have shown that elderly who smoke may be at increased risk for dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 17,610 Evidence: moderate

Incidence and risk of dementia. The Rotterdam Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. American journal of epidemiology 1998-03-01

To assess age-, sex-, and subtype-specific incidence rates of dementia and to calculate the risk of dementia, the authors performed a large, community-based, prospective cohort study on dementia as part of the Rotterdam Study. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 7,046 Evidence: moderate

All indicators of atherosclerosis were associated with dementia (odds ratios ranging from 1.3 to 1.9) and its major subtypes Alzheimer's disease (odds ratios 1.3-1.8) and vascular dementia (odds ratios 1.9-3.2). 4 key findings →

Participants: 284 Evidence: low

Contrary to previous reports, head trauma was not a risk factor for AD, and smoking did not protect against AD. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate

Do nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs decrease the risk for Alzheimer's disease? The Rotterdam Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 55 out of 100. Neurology 1995-08-01

Based on reports that the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) may reduce the risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD), we studied the cross-sectional relation between NSAID use and the risk for AD in a population-based study of disease and disability in older people. 2 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 365 Evidence: low

Insulin and cognitive function in an elderly population. The Rotterdam Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 54 out of 100. Diabetes care 1997-05-01

An increase in postload insulin only in women was associated with a decrease in cognitive function (age-adjusted regression coefficient -0.10 per 50 mU/l insulin; 95% CI -0.16 to -0.04). 4 key findings →

Participants: 5,510 Evidence: low

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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