27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
We found that multiple sleep measures predicted future risk of stroke and dementia, but these associations were attenuated after controlling for cardiovascular risk factors and were absent in MR analyses for Alzheimer disease. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 502,383 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We tested the hypothesis that plasma neurofilament light chain (NfL) identifies asymptomatic carriers of familial frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD)-causing mutations at risk of disease progression. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 277 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
DNA methylation algorithms are increasingly used to estimate biological aging; however, how these proposed measures of whole-organism biological aging relate to aging in the brain is not known. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 649 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We re-assessed after longer follow-up time in the large population-based cohort of the Rotterdam Study whether smoking habits and pack-years of smoking are associated with the risk of dementia, Alzheimer disease (AD), and vascular dementia (VaD). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 6,868 Evidence: moderate
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Whether this results in an increased risk for dementia remains unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort Participants: 3,975 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Low bone mineral density (BMD) and dementia commonly co-occur in older individuals, with bone loss accelerating in patients with dementia due to physical inactivity and poor nutrition. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 3,651 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We analyzed prospectively collected data in the Original and Offspring FHS cohorts. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 4,906 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Choroid plexus (ChP) is emerging as a key brain structure in the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative disorders. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 135 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The association between vascular risk factors and dementia varies with age, making generalizability of dementia risk prediction rules to individuals of different ages challenging. 4 key findings →
Participants: 4,899 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Unsaturated fatty acids are important constituents of neuronal cell membranes and have neuroprotective, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory properties. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 5,289 Evidence: moderate
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We observed 234 cases of all-cause dementia over 10 years of follow-up. 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,457 Evidence: low
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We analyzed data from 11,709 participants without a history of coronary heart disease or stroke who attended the baseline examination (1987-1989) of the prospective Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. 4 key findings →
Participants: 11,709 Evidence: moderate
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The association between patterns of physical/mental activity and dementia and how it is affected by disease susceptibility remains unknown. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
From the population-based Rotterdam Study, 4,447 participants underwent dietary assessment and brain MRI scanning between 2005 and 2015. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 4,447 Evidence: moderate
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It has been suggested that the risk might be particularly increased for carriers of the APOE-epsilon4 allele. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 6,645 Evidence: moderate
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We evaluated dementia-free Framingham Heart Study (generation 3) participants (mean age 48.5 years, 46.8% men) who underwent cognitive testing for memory, abstract reasoning, visual perception, attention, and executive function (n = 2,231) and brain MRI (n = 2018) to assess total white matter, lobar gray matter, and white matter hyperintensity volumes and fractional anisotropy (FA) measures. 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,231 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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We aimed to investigate whether the increased risk of dementia among individuals with diabetes can be offset by a broad combination of healthy lifestyle factors. 4 key findings →
Participants: 167,946 Evidence: moderate
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Given the potential therapeutic effect of vascular disease control timing to reduce dementia risk, we investigated the age-related influences of vascular risk factor burden on brain structure throughout the lifespan. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 2,887 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We included 730 Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) participants without dementia (282 cognitively normal, 448 mild cognitive impairment) with baseline [ 18 F]florbetapir PET and CSF Aβ 42 available. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 318 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
From 2011 to 2013, 1,744 participants completed high-resolution vessel wall MRI from the population-based Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study by a sampling strategy that allowed weighting back to the cohort. 4 key findings →
Participants: 291 Evidence: moderate
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Increased homocysteine levels might accelerate dopaminergic cell death in Parkinson disease (PD), through neurotoxic effects. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 5,289 Evidence: moderate
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Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by aggregates of the microtubule-associated protein tau (MAPT). 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 172 Evidence: moderate
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We investigated the associations between retinopathy and dementia and its subtypes Alzheimer disease (AD) and vascular dementia both cross-sectionally and prospectively in the Rotterdam Study, a large population-based cohort study. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 195 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 →