27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
An increased plasma homocysteine level is a strong, independent risk factor for the development of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,092 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We estimated the remaining lifetime risks of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia from all causes, based on data from longitudinal population studies. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 198 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Diabetes mellitus did not increase the risk of incident AD in the Framingham cohort overall; however, DM may be a risk factor for AD in the absence of other known major AD risk factors. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,210 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Cross-sectional epidemiological and clinical research suggests that lower cardiac index is associated with abnormal brain aging, including smaller brain volumes, increased white matter hyperintensities, and worse cognitive performances. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 184 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Stroke increases a subject's risk of dementia as compared with age- and sex-matched controls. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 212 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
During the 17-year follow-up period, 164 participants developed dementia; 136 of these cases were AD. 5 key findings →
Participants: 164 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These findings support previous contentions that a "preclinical phase" of detectable cognitive deficits can precede the clinical diagnosis of probable AD by many years, and they also support the hypothesis that problems with secondary verbal memory are among the first signs of AD. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,045 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Selective survival of men with a healthier cardiovascular risk profile and hence lower propensity to dementia might partly explain the higher LTR of dementia/AD in women. 1 key finding →
Participants: 7,901 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The LTR of stroke in middle-aged adults is 1 in 6 or more, which is equal to or greater than the LTR of AD. 3 key findings →
Participants: 4,897 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
In women, increased plasma adiponectin levels are an independent risk factor for the development of both all-cause dementia and AD. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 159 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Central auditory speech-processing deficits may be an early manifestation of probable Alzheimer's disease and may precede the onset of dementia diagnosis by many years. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Mid-life stroke risk factors have been related to late-life cognitive impairment. 4 key findings →
Participants: 1,841 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Systemic inflammation is associated with ischemia and Alzheimer disease (AD). 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this large, population-based cohort, baseline and long-term average serum total cholesterol levels were not associated with the risk for incident AD. 3 key findings →
Participants: 1,026 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
The "preclinical phase" of detectable lowering of cognitive functioning precedes the appearance of pAD by many years. 2 key findings →
Participants: 1,076 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
We determined the prevalence of dementia and probable senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT) for biennial Exam 17 of the Framingham cohort (1982/1983). 5 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
This article focuses on the effects of operational differences in case ascertainment on estimates of prevalence and incidence of cognitive impairment and/or dementia of the Alzheimer type. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Heart failure is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and cerebrovascular disease. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Studies of autosomal dominant Alzheimer disease (AD) have shown structural and cognitive changes in mutation carriers decades prior to clinical disease. 1 key finding →
Participants: 717 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In a previous study of normal elderly male twins, the heritability of quantitative white matter hyperintensity (WMH) volume has been estimated to be high (0.73). 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,012 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Hearing loss significantly lowered performance on the verbal parts of the Mini-Mental State Examination. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
The adverse effects of obesity and hypertension in men are independent and cumulative with respect to cognitive deficit. 1 key finding →
Participants: 551 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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 →