27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
The incidence rate of dementia in Europe and North America has declined by 13% per decade over the past 25 years, consistently across studies. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 49,202 Evidence: moderate
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White matter hyperintensities are associated with an increased risk of all-dementia and Alzheimer's disease in the general population. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,913 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The average life expectancy of people with dementia at time of diagnosis ranged from 5.7 years at age 65 to 2.2 at age 85 in men and from 8.0 to 4.5, respectively, in women. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 5,553,960 Evidence: high
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We conducted a meta-analysis of the conflicting epidemiologic evidence on the association between midlife body mass index (BMI) and dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 19 Evidence: high
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The APOE-ε4 allele has long been associated with increased risks of Alzheimer's disease and mortality, but the effect of the less prevalent APOE-ε2 allele on diseases in the elderly and survival remains elusive. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 38,537 Evidence: moderate
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Alzheimer's disease is one of the most heritable diseases in elderly people and the most common type of dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 926 Evidence: moderate
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Cerebral hypoperfusion has previously been associated with mild cognitive impairment and dementia in various cross-sectional studies, but whether hypoperfusion precedes neurodegeneration is unknown. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 4,759 Evidence: low
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To systematically review the literature for dementia prediction models for use in the general population and externally validate their performance in a head-to-head comparison. 4 key findings →
Participants: 867 Evidence: low
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Retinal structures may serve as a biomarker for dementia, but longitudinal studies examining this link are lacking. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 5,065 Evidence: moderate
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Atrial fibrillation (AF) has been suggested as a risk factor for dementia since it may lead to chronic cerebral hypoperfusion and stroke. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 6,514 Evidence: moderate
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Overall, cumulative incidence was uniformly higher in NACC than in the population-based cohorts. 3 key findings →
Participants: 5,073 Evidence: moderate
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Microbleed prevalence was 15.3% (median [interquartile range] count, 1 [1-88]). 5 key findings →
Participants: 4,841 Evidence: low
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During a mean follow-up of 12.1 years, 1,520 individuals developed dementia, 1,194 of whom had AD. 4 key findings →
Participants: 12,305 Evidence: low
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Analyses were performed within the Rotterdam Study (baseline 1997), a prospective, population-based cohort. 4 key findings →
Participants: 9,446 Evidence: moderate
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From 2000 to 2002, we assessed parental history of dementia in participants without dementia of the Rotterdam Study. 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,087 Evidence: moderate
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Orthostatic hypotension (OH) is a common cause of transient cerebral hypoperfusion in the population. 4 key findings →
Participants: 6,204 Evidence: low
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Total hippocampal volume has been consistently linked to cognitive function and dementia. 4 key findings →
Participants: 5,035 Evidence: moderate
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Vitamin D has gained interest as a potentially modifiable risk factor for dementia because of its putative neuroprotective effects. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 6,220 Evidence: moderate
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Cerebral vasoreactivity (CVR) is a key factor in maintenance of continuous cerebral perfusion and a marker of (micro)vascular damage. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,629 Evidence: moderate
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Identification of individuals at high risk of dementia is essential for development of prevention strategies, but reliable tools are lacking for risk stratification in the population. 4 key findings →
Participants: 181 Evidence: moderate
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Late-life depressive symptoms have been extensively studied for their relationship with incident dementia, but have been typically assessed at a single timepoint. 4 key findings →
Participants: 3,325 Evidence: moderate
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Cognitive dysfunction is a common feature among patients with parkinsonism, including Parkinson disease (PD). 4 key findings →
Participants: 7,386 Evidence: low
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Within the prospective population-based Rotterdam Study, we measured serum magnesium levels in 9,569 participants, free from dementia at baseline (1997-2008). 4 key findings →
Participants: 9,569 Evidence: moderate
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Neurofilament light chain (NfL) is a promising biomarker for risk stratification and disease monitoring of dementia, but its utility in the preclinical disease stage remains uncertain. 4 key findings →
Participants: 975 Evidence: low
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Within the prospective population-based Rotterdam Study, we studied lifetime risk of dementia, stroke and parkinsonism between 1990 and 2016. 4 key findings →
Participants: 102 Evidence: low
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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 →