The majority of community-dwelling older persons have brain pathology. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 80 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Research
28,580 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
The lack of strong association between brain beta-amyloid deposition and cognitive impairment has been a challenge for the Alzheimer's disease (AD) field. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 678 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Alzheimer's dementia is significantly more common in women than in men. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 971 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The APOE ϵ4 allele is a strong risk factor across the LBD spectrum and occurs at an increased frequency in pDLB relative to PDD. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 244 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Florbetapir-PET imaging was performed a mean of 99 days (range, 1-377 days) before death for the 29 individuals in the primary analysis cohort. 2 key findings →
Participants: 35 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 28,580 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 28,580 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (62.2% of the library) and OpenAlex (17.8%), 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.
1,034 records (3.6% 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 →